EXCHANGE
BIOLOGY
LIBRARY
G
THE COLVER LECTURES
IN BROWN UNIVERSITY
1921
HUMAN LIFE AS THE BIOLOGIST
SEES IT
BY
VERNON KELLOGG
BROWN UNIVERSITY. THE COLVFJR ^CTtfEBS, 1921;
HUMAN LIFE
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
BY
VERNON KELLOGG, Sc.D., LL.D.
SECRETARY, NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL; SOMETIME
PROFESSOR IN STANFORD UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1922
BIOLOGY
LIBRARY
G
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY BROWN UNIVERSITY
AU rightt reserved
THE Colver lectureship is provided by a fund of
$10,000 presented to the University by Mr. and
Mrs. Jesse L. Rosenberger of Chicago in memory of
Mrs. Rosenberger's father, Charles K. Colver of the
class of 1842. The following sentences from the letter
accompanying the gift explain the purposes of the foun-
dation:
"It is desired that, so far as possible, for these lectures
only subjects of particular importance and lecturers emi-
nent in scholarship or of other marked qualifications
shall be chosen. It is desired that the lectures shall be
distinctive and valuable contributions to human knowl-
edge, known for their quality rather than their number.
Income, or portions of income, not used for lectures may
be used for the publication of any of the lectures deemed
desirable to be so published."
Charles Kendrick Colver (1821-1896) was a graduate
of Brown University of the class of 1842. The necrol-
ogist of the University wrote of him: "He was distin-
guished for his broad and accurate scholarship, his
unswerving personal integrity, championship of truth,
and obedience to God in his daily life. He was severely
simple and unworldly in character."
The lectures now published in this series are:
1916
The American Conception of Liberty and Government, by
Frank Johnson Goodnow, LL.D., President of Johns
Hopkins University.
1917
Medical Research and Human Welfare, by W. W. Keen,
M.D., LL.D. (Brown), Emeritus Professor of Sur-
gery, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia.
V
1918
The Responsible State: A Reexamination of Fundamental
Political Doctrines in the Light of World War and the
Menace of Anarchism, by Franklin Henry Giddings,
LL.D., Professor of Sociology and the History of
Civilization in Columbia University; sometime Pro-
fessor of Political Science in Bryn Mawr College.
1919
Democracy: Discipline: Peace, by William Roscoe
Thayer.
1920
Plymouth and the Pilgrims, by Arthur Lord.
1921
Human Life as the Biologist Sees It, by Vernon Kellogg,
Sc.D., LL.D., Secretary, National Research Council;
sometime Professor in Stanford University.
vi
CONTENTS
PART I
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 3
1. HUMAN ORIGIN AND RELATIONSHIPS. ... 8
2. THE BIOLOGIST AND PRESENT MAN 37
PART II
1. THE BIOLOGIST AND WAR 49
2. HEREDITY AND HUMAN PROBLEMS 64
3. THE BIOLOGIST AND THE REPUBLIC .... 90
PART III
1. THE BIOLOGIST AND EVERYDAY LITE ... 96
2. THE BIOLOGIST AND DEATH 106
3. THE BIOLOGIST AND SOUL 118
4. THE BIOLOGIST AND THE FUTURE
vn
HUMAN LIFE
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
HUMAN LIFE
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
i
INTRODUCTORY
WHILE engaged in the work of Mr.
Hoover's relief organizations I saw a good
deal at very close range of the behavior of
men at war. I saw a constant struggle
in the case of some of these men in posi-
tions of authority between two elements
in their make-up; a brute element inherent
in them as a biologically inherited ves-
tige of prehistoric days, and a strictly
human element more recently acquired
and transmitted to them by education
and social inheritance. Sometimes one ele-
ment dictated their behavior, sometimes
the other. Sometimes, unfortunately,
the element of education reinforced the
element of brute inheritance. The exist-
3
HUMAN LIFE
ence and influence of these two usually
conflicting parts of human make-up were
made especially clear and sharp because
of the unwonted and continuous stress of
the whole situation. It was an unusual
opportunity for the biologist-student of
human life to observe the relative strength
of these two factors which play their parts
in the determination of the behavior and
fate of us all. Are we, in our present
evolutionary stage, more animal than
human or more human than animal?
And why? And can any attempt at
scientific analysis of present human
make-up give us knowledge that will
enable us to live more rationally, more
successfully, more happily?
As detached and cool-blooded as he can
possibly be in his contemplation of the
make-up and the capacities and behavior
of human beings, the biologist is neverthe-
less often overcome by those same feelings
of awe and reverence in the face of the
"wonders of human life," which over-
come other less cool-blooded persons.
4
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
Jn his laboratory and study he may assure
himself that he is dealing only with an
unusually complex, highly-endowed, and,
in every way, remarkable animal, and
reassure himself, in the face of the diffi-
culties of the biological analysis of this
animal, by remembering how he has been
able to reveal, and, in some measure,
explain the make-up and capacities of
other at first baffling animals. But in
his home with his family, and in his social
intercourse with his friends and acquaint-
ances, he sometimes loses the confidence
of his laboratory hours. My wife and
little girl are confusingly different from
that impersonal thing, man as a lab-
oratory subject, which I persist in
hoping to analyze into pieces and prop-
erties capable of scientific explanation, or
at least description. There is something,
or many things, in all the human beings I
know personally, and something in my-
self, which make them and me very dif-
ferent from the samples of the species
that I study in the laboratory.
5
HUMAN LIFE
And yet as biologist I persist in this
study, and I follow closely and hopefully
the similar studies of other biologists,
using this term to mean, in this instance,
men variously called morphologists, phys-
iologists, psychologists, sociologists, econ-
omists, political scientists, and historians,
some of whom may object to being called
biologists but most of whom are glad to be
so called. And in my talks to you, at the
courteous invitation of the authorities of
Brown University, and as the incumbent
for this year of the lectureship endowed
by one of Brown's loyal and generous
alumni, I shall try to tell you quite simply
and frankly something of the biologist's
attitude toward human life as a problem
he feels bound to study, and of what he
thinks he has found out and what he
knows he has not found out in the course
of his study as so far prosecuted.
I started studying human life as a
biologist by studying first plants, then
birds, and, finally, and for a long time,
insects. This might be called my under-
6
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
graduate course in human life. I began
my graduate course first with a baby,
my own for special subject, and then as
she grew older I turned to something
easier, just men and women with whom I
had less personal relations and knew only
as representatives of the animal species,
man. I found that I could not advisedly
let my serious biological studies be in-
terfered with by such incidental but,
some way, very confusing, things as
sympathy and love and pride and hope.
HUMAN LIFE
HUMAN ORIGIN AND
RELATIONSHIPS
THE biologist pays much attention to
origins; often too much. Two things can
have a common or related origin and yet
acquire differences in the course of their
development which make, for all practical
purposes, two very different things out of
them. Quantitative differences may come
to be so great that they have all the
practical effect of qualitative differences.
Or qualitative differences, very small, in-
deed, when measured by the chemist or
physicist and described in the terminology
of their sciences, may have very large
effects in the practical relation of the
substances or things exhibiting them.
The sugar-loving man who eats a little
of a certain substance which the chemist
assures him is made up of the same
numbers of atoms of the same three
kinds of chemical elements of which
8
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
sugar is composed, although these atoms
are arranged within the molecules in a
way slightly differing from their arrange-
ment in sugar, may find himself poisoned
instead of strengthened. Or, the man
who accepts the statement of the zoologi-
cal morphologist that the nervous system
of a certain animal differs primarily
from that of another in that there is not
quite so much of it, but that it is, as far as
it goes, of essentially the same kind, and
who therefore expects to find his first
animal exhibiting the same kind of sense,
only not quite so much of it, as his
second, will be much surprised when he
becomes really acquainted with the sense
differences of his two animals.
Nevertheless the biologist has good
grounds for paying much attention to
commonness of origin and similarities of
structural make-up in his attempts to
read the riddle of life, even human life.
Things that have come from the same
thing, or that have a fundamental like-
ness of structure, are bound to have some
9
HUMAN LIFE
commonness of capacity and behavior.
And so the biologist in his approach to
man as a subject of scientific scrutiny is
deeply interested in the possible unravel-
ing of the tangled and broken skein of
his biological history. Whence and how
has he come into being? And into being
in the particular form and condition
which now characterize him? Can human
characteristics be found in less complex
stage of development and organization
elsewhere in the world of life? And if the
human body shows no radical qualitative
differences from other animal bodies what
will be the significance of this to the
biologist in his attempt to study and
appraise human life?
As to human origin the biologist finds
no tangible evidence to support any other
explanation than the now familiar and
widely-accepted one of evolution from
pre-existing lower animal kinds. For this
explanation he does find what is, to him,
practically convincing evidence. It is of
no very great interest, certainly of no
10
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
very great importance to most of us,
if we once accept this evolutionary ex-
planation of origin, whether man is
traced backward to this or that particular
kind of anthropoid ape, or other less
anthropoid ancestor. However, when we
watch a chimpanzee for some time we
come to have a hope that he is not the
particular anthropoid whom the biologist
would ask us to recognize with any
filial admiration or affection. The feeling
is even more marked when the orang-utan
or the gorilla is the object of our curiosity.
It is true, though, that if we watch a
chimpanzee long enough a rather unset-
tling feeling is likely to grow on us that
there is something uncannily familiar
about him. He seems to be a caricature
of some people we know; he behaves curi-
ously like some children, other people's
children, that we recall.
I had an experience with a chimpanzee
once in Berlin, which sticks always in my
memory. I was giving at the time, as a
student of zoology, some special attention
11
HUMAN LIFE
to anthropoids, and used to go out almost
daily to the Zoological Gardens where I
had become acquainted with the keeper
of the apes. He had a favorite chimpan-
zee which he used to keep with him a
great deal in his own room or office, and
I got into the habit of dropping in fre-
quently for an afternoon chat with the
friendly pair. The keeper was a rather
stolid sort of person who seemed to me to
possess a marked paucity of human feeling
and expression. On the other hand the
chimpanzee seemed possessed of a wide
range of human-like interests and feelings
and was fascinatingly varied and interest-
ing in his expression of them. The con-
viction even grew on me that he was
almost the more human of the two.
He rarely paid me the compliment of
showing any special recognition of me or
interest in me. I seemed to lack any
special traits of attractiveness for him.
But when one day, with the permission of
the keeper, I brought an American fam-
ily with me who had with them a coal
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
black, extremely African negress as nurse-
maid, the chimpanzee was so animatedly
friendly to this dear old mammy from the
very first moment of her entrance that
she soon fled, screaming with horror and
fright. I shall never forget the strong
impression made on me of the chimpan-
zee's immediate apparent recognition of
Matilda as an old acquaintance; she was
the kind of human being he knew about
and was interested in. Yet as he had been
brought to the Gardens as a baby and
had had really no personal acquaintance-
ship with negroes, if he really knew Ma-
tilda or had some sense of relationship
with her, it must have been a case of
biological memory.
However, the biologist does not claim
that we are directly descended from the
chimpanzee or any other particular an-
thropoid or particular lower kind of
monkey that we know, either living or
extinct. Some biologists favor an origin
from a generalized Lemurine type, others
from a Tarsius type, and others venture
13
HUMAN LIFE
to claim a breaking away from the
quadrumanous group much higher up in
its series, seeing in the anthropoids and
man the latest and highest two diverging
branches in the tall genealogical tree of
human ancestry. That anthropoid and
human structure are too fundamentally
and minutely similar to be coincidence or
anything else than true homology, and
hence indisputable evidence of a common-
ness of origin, the biologist simply accepts
as a biological fact without regard to his
feelings of friendliness or unfriendliness
for chimpanzees and their immediate
relatives.
I This structural evidence of ancestral
relationship between the anthropoids and
man is, of course, added to by several
other well-known kinds of likenesses,
physiological, psychological, and even
ecological. The similarity of the chemical
character of the blood of the two groups
as evidenced by the identity of its re-
actions in the face of certain stimulation,
the so-called precipitin reactions, these
14
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
reactions differing from those of the
blood of other higher mammals, is a
notable modern addition to the biological
evidence for anthropoid and human rela-
tionships. For the same identities or
close similarities in blood character occur
in the case of other kinds of animals well
known to be closely related, as the wolf
and dog, or the horse and ass, and do
not occur when the blood of two less
closely related animals is tested.
A less important and less well-known
added bit of evidence is one that came
under my own observation a few years
ago during the course of some study of
certain highly specialized external insect
parasites of man and some other mam-
mals. In this study it became apparent
that the kinds of these parasites character-
istic of and limited to men and apes are
more closely related to each other than
they are to parasitic kinds characteristic
of the other quadrumana or of any other
mammals. That is, the parasites of the
apes are even less closely related to those
15
HUMAN LIFE
of the other monkeys than they are to
those of man. This points to a probable
commonness of origin of the now slightly
differentiated parasites of men and apes
from some parasite ancestor which may
have helped make life uncomfortable for
certain common ancestors of the anthro-
poids and early men.
The biologist finds another evidence of
man's place in nature as simply one among
the various groups of mammals, in the
conditions of the physical variation among
different human races, or species, as they
would likely be called by any entirely
disinterested student of human kind. If
an expedition of scientific gentlemen from
the Academy of Sciences of Mars, say,
should some day find its way to our
planet, they would doubtless report to
their colleagues, on their return, the
discovery of a considerable number of
earth-inhabiting different species of man,
and might issue a classificatory mono-
graph on them not unlike one of our own
monographs on the various species of
16
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
bears. Our attempts at classifying the
bears, you know, are attended by a good
deal of discussion as to whether some of
the different kinds are just different races
or varieties of one species or whether
they truly represent different species. As
a matter of fact, I suppose this doesn't
much worry the bears; it only worries the
scientists.
There is also some suggestive evidence
about man's position in Nature to be
derived from the facts of the geographical
distribution of his different races. The
suggestiveness comes from the interesting
resemblance of the status of this distribu-
tion to that obtaining generally among
the higher vertebrates. Dr. J. C. Mer-
riam, the distinguished paleontologist and
student of the history of the human
species, has especially stressed this fact
and its significance. Just as the distribu-
tion of the members of a group of mam-
mals or birds indicates in fairly clear
outlines a classification of these members
such as would be made on a basis of their
17
HUMAN LIFE
comparative structure, so the different
subdivisions of human kind show a
similar parallel in their distribution and
structural similarities or dissimilarities.
Now the essential point of all that has
just been said concerning man's striking
structural similarity to certain higher
animals and concerning his likenesses to
them in other ways, physiological, varia-
tional and distributional, is that in these
similarities the biologist finds convincing
proof of man's origin from, and definite
relation to other forms of life. And this
must be ever in our minds in all our
subsequent discussion. But before point-
ing out any of the probable special
significances to the biologist student of
human life of the undoubted evolutionary
derivation of man from lower, non-human
forms of life, let us glance briefly at
another aspect of the consideration of
human origin, namely, the pre-history
of man as an animal of unmistakable
human estate, but of much more primi-
tive human culture than he is at present,
18
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
a history that the discoveries and investi-
gations of the last score of years have
done more to reveal than had all study
previous to the beginning of this century.
The search for relics of man, both of his
body and his handiwork or culture, may
be, and has, in fact, been, pursued in two
slightly different special ways. The his-
torian may trace man back to the days of
earliest history as recorded by preserved
books and scripts. Then the archaeolo-
gist and ethnologist may carry the story,
ever more broken and incomplete, back
by study of his scattered carved hiero-
glyphs and monuments and implements.
Such studies take us back to days of the
earliest civilizations of China and Egypt
and Asia Minor and Crete.
Here the archaeologist hands over the
search to the anthropologist and paleon-
tologist, whom he finds have been working
from the other end, that is, from earlier
periods up to later ones instead of from
later ones back to earlier ones, and have
been working rather as students of biol-
19
HUMAN LIFE
ogy and geology than students of human-
istics. Man for them is an animal whose
evolutionary history is to be traced,
as that of other animals is traced, by
finding and studying his fossils or the
preserved products of his handiwork, or
those of his forebears, in their relation to
successive geologic formations, hence to
time. It is to the paleontologist and
historical anthropologist, therefore, that
we look for facts concerning the very
earliest days of man's existence. How
far back in geologic time, how long ago as
estimated in years and centuries, does
man seem to have lived on this earth?
Where did he live? Does he first appear
as scattered over all the land surface of
the globe, as he now is, or was he originally
limited to a certain part or parts of it?
What sort of man was he in those first
man days? What of his body? What of
his habits, his culture, his relation as
individual to others of his kind? Oh,
there are many crowding questions we
wish to put to the student of prehistoric
20
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
man, too many to enumerate. And we
really hang breathless on his answers.
But before we listen to any of the an-
swers let us note that the anthropologist
in his attempts to satisfy his and our
curiosity about primitive man has a
second string to his bow in addition to
that provided him primarily by the
paleontologist. He recognizes in his
study of the man-group, just as the
general biologist does in his study of any
group of animals or plants, that the
present existing members of his group
are not all of equal evolutionary advance-
ment or chronology. There are always
some of a type less advanced or special-
ized, and some of types more advanced.
The less advanced are usually presumed
to be older in their evolutionary origin
than the more advanced, so that although
they all live now side by side and at the
same time, some may be looked on as in a
form or stage of greater primitiveness or
antiquity as compared with others. This
is indeed quite true of the various living
HUMAN LIFE
kinds or races of man. The native
Australians, the Veddahs of Ceylon, the
Ainos of Japan, the Bushmen of Central
Africa and several other scattered similar
small groups do represent in their physical
structure, mental capacity and general
culture more primitive stages in human
evolution than those represented by the
larger Caucasian, Mongolian, Negro and
Polynesian groups that comprise the
great majority of living men.
In comparing the physical and men-
tal character and the culture of these
living primitive types with the character
and culture of various extinct types of
men, as indicated by their recovered
bones and articles of handiwork, the
anthropologist finds such similarities that
he can refer with some confidence to
these living primitive types as paralleling
in many characteristics some of the more
recent types of prehistoric man. He has
not yet found alive that missing link
between man and the anthropoids which
some anthropologists have fondly iin-
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
agined may still be living in unexplored
regions of Africa or Asia and to find
which expeditions have been occasionally
sent out, only so far to return empty-
handed. Nor does he find any living
types which can possibly be construed to
parallel in their condition, or actually to
be persisting remnants of, the most
ancient or most primitive types of real
men. But he gets nearer to understand-
ing the life of man in those days when
types of men now extinct were the
highest types, by looking at human life
as exhibited by the lowest types now
living.
What, then, are some of the specific
facts which have been determined by
paleontologists and anthropologists con-
cerning prehistoric man? To try to tell
the whole story is far beyond my inten-
tion. We have neither time nor, indeed,
need for it for the purposes of this dis-
cussion. But the outstanding parts of it
can be told in few words, and these parts
are extremely pertinent to any general
23
HUMAN LIFE
consideration of human history; to any
special consideration of human life from
the view-point of the biologist they are
truly essential.
I must recall to your minds that geol-
ogists divide the eight hundred million
years, more or less, of earth time into a
series of successive ages characterized by
differing kinds of rocks and by different
floras and faunas, all, with the exception
of the flora and fauna of the present age,
now extinct. It is with only a few of the
more recent of these ages that we need
now concern ourselves in our search for
the geologic evidence of man's origin.
Of course, recent is a comparative term.
It means, in the mouth of the geologist,
something within anywhere from the
last few hundred thousand to the last
few million years.
In the rocks of these more recent ages,
beginning with an age called Lower
Oligocene, and running on up through
Upper Oligocene, Lower, Mid and Upper
Miocene and Pliocene, have been found
24
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
the fossil remains of numerous now
extinct anthropoid apes. These have
been found not only in Asia and Africa,
to which continents the few living anthro-
poids are now restricted, but also in
Europe which so far has been the source
of all but two of the most ancient human
relics. I speak of these fossils as repre-
senting numerous anthropoids; but nu-
merous is also a comparative term; I mean
by it, simply, considerably more kinds of
anthropoids than now exist; and some
of these seem to be of a higher specializa-
tion than any living anthropoids. But
the rocks of none of these ages have
revealed any fossils of indubitable human
creatures. The one case which may
possibly constitute an exception to this
statement is that of the famous Pithecan-
thropus, a creature of which a few bones,
to be specific, a skull cap, a femur and
two molar teeth, probably belonging to a
single individual, were found nearly thirty
years ago in Java by Dubois. These
relics were found in a situation which if
25
HUMAN LIFE
it does not allow the fossils to be ascribed
definitively to the Pliocene Age, in its
very latest days to be sure, at least proves
this relic to be an antiquity as old as the
very beginning of the Pleistocene or
Glacial Age. This is the age immediately
succeeding the Pliocene and is the most
recent of the geologic series, unless the
period since the last great continental
glaciers existed is given a special name,
such as Recent (with a capital letter)
or Present, to distinguish it from that
period which included the several glacial
and interglacial times now recognized as
comprised in the so-called Glacial Age.
Pithecanthropus has been variously
hailed with joy as the long-sought missing
link or looked on with scorn as an in-
dividual degenerate human reversion, or
looked on, with less emotion but more
judgment, as a creature of very great
interest and importance in the study of
man's origin whether it be called highest
of apes or lowest of men or whether it be
excluded from the direct line of human
26
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
genealogy and called an offshoot from
this direct line, but one arising just before
the line had culminated in undoubted
human kind. In a famous discussion,
held around the actual fossils brought by
their discoverer to the Zoological Congress
at Leyden in 1895, and participated in by
an extraordinary gathering of the most
eminent anthropologists of the world,
five of these experts maintained that
Pithecanthropus was an ape, seven that
it was a man, and seven others that it
was a transition form between man and
the anthropoids. The discussion was one,
you see, primarily of precise classification;
there was practical agreement that this
creature of uppermost Pliocene or lowest
Pleistocene time was so much like an ape
and at the same time so much like a man
that it proved, if proof were still needed,
that as far as structure, at least, is con-
cerned the anthropoids and man differ
only quantitatively and not qualitatively.
Now Pithecanthropus lived at least
from five hundred thousand to one million
27
HUMAN LIFE
years ago; so that, if he really represents
man in lowest human terms, we have had
a human history on this earth of which
the period since the earliest historically
known civilizations of Egypt and Crete is
a very small fraction. But that is not
necessarily to disparage the possibility of
a great deal of important human history
occurring during that small fraction of
time. The biologist is not so foolish as
to suggest that extent of time alone is a
measure of the importance of epochs in
human history. For most of us that last
one hundred-thousandth of the period of
man's existence has a hundred thousand
times more interest than all the rest. But
the biologist believes that paying a little
attention to prehistoric man may make
the greater attention we pay to historic
man more fruitful of a sounder under-
standing of human character, capacity
and possibility.
We seem rather to have taken for
granted that Pithecanthropus was the
first man or obviously near-man type.
28
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
If this is to be our starting point we ask
the paleontologist if he has found a more
or less continuous series of human fossils
running forward from Pithecanthropus,
both as to time and evolutionary develop-
ment, up to now. His answer inclines
to be, Yes. But, in truth, he has found
comparatively few actual fossils or relics
of human bodies and very considerable
gaps exist in the series both as to
gradations in structure and time periods
represented. In fact, only one of his
undoubted human relics goes back in
geologic time to a period approaching
that represented by Pithecanthropus.
This oldest one is known as the " Heidel-
berg jaw " because it was found in the
Elsenz Valley not far from Heidelberg
and is a lower jaw bone with almost all
of the teeth in place. Comparing it with
the present human jaw it is notable for its
unusual size, lack of protruding chin, and
great strength and thickness combined
with unusual width of the region for the
attachment of the muscles used in masti-
29
HUMAN LIFE
cation. The teeth are large but not out of
proportion to the size of the jaw. The
jaw bone itself is more simian than
human, but the teeth are more human
than simian. Particularly notable in
this respect are the canines which are
not large and long, as simian and many
other mammal canines are, but small
and not extending above the level of the
other teeth. However, in their size,
heavy roots, and wide pulp cavities, all
the teeth present characters which dis-
tinguish them readily from human teeth
of today.
In addition to these very earliest actual
remains of the bodies of man or man-ape,
there have been found, in various local-
ities in Portugal, France, Belgium, and
England, and perhaps elsewhere, a con-
siderable number of flaked flints in
positions which undeniably refer them to
a geologic time ranging back through
Pleistocene into Pliocene and probably
into an even earlier age. These flaked
flints, which in higher or more complex
30
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
stages of flaking are commonly known in
connection with all of prehistoric man's
later Pleistocene life, and even with
present human life as exhibited by the
more primitive living peoples, are, in
their earliest forms known as eoliths
the subject of much discussion. It has
been shown that a certain simple flaking
of flint stones can occur by natural
physical means without the aid of living
creatures. But many of these Pliocene
or very early Pleistocene eoliths show such
a kind of flaking, affording cutting edges
and grips for firm holding in the hand,
fitting them to be very simple weapons or
tools, that many competent anthropol-
ogists insist that they must have been
produced by living creatures of sufficient
wit and dexterity to make tools out of the
material at hand most available for this
purpose. Indeed, we can well imagine
the first human beings picking up natur-
ally partly flaked flints and then moving
on to better tools or weapons by intelli-
gently and deliberately further flaking
31
HUMAN LIFE
them or flaking other flints found still in
the form of heavy rounded pebbles of
various sizes.
The great importance of these eoliths
to the student of early man is that if
they are really man-made they help sub-
stantiate the evidence of Pithecanthropus
and the Heidelberg jaw as to man's
probable origin in Pliocene time, or
even earlier. If man did arise in Pliocene
time then his antiquity is carried back
by many hundred thousand years behind
that later Pleistocene period in which
we can be certain of his existence on the
basis of undoubted human fossils.
This Pleistocene or Glacial Age of
which our present time may be reckoned
the latest part, was a period of several
hundred thousand years characterized
by a succession of great continental
glaciers sweeping down from the north,
probably three on this continent and four
in Europe, with separating interglacial
times of considerably higher average tem-
perature and hence climatic amelioration.
32
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
In the times of the glaciers, animals of the
colder regions as the mammoth, aurochs
and the like occurred all over Europe
even to its present southern boundaries,
while in the warmer interglacial times
animals characteristic of lower latitudes,
even considerably lower than those of
present southern Europe, replaced them.
It is to this interesting age of alternating
cold and warm periods that all the known
actual older human fossils so far found
in Europe, with the exception of the
probably older Heidelberg jaw, already
mentioned, are assigned.
We have not time even to catalogue
these relics of Pleistocene man, let alone
refer to them in any detail. All that we
can do, and indeed all that for our
present purpose we need to do, is to say
that skulls and teeth and arm and leg
bones and other skeletal parts, sometimes
very fragmentary, sometimes gratifyingly
intact, together with simple stone and
bone weapons and tools and primitive
carvings and drawings on cavern walls,
33
HUMAN LIFE
amounting in all to a very informing
quantity of indubitable human remains,
have been discovered and exhaustively
studied, with the result of revealing the
certain existence of man in Europe all
through Pleistocene Time, or at least
from the first interglacial period of the
Pleistocene Age up to that comparatively
modern time when the archaeologist and
later the historian takes up the story of
human kind.
The careful study of all these Pleisto-
cene relics of early man's body has en-
abled anthropologists to distinguish cer-
tain successive types of prehistoric man
differing in some measure structurally
and evolutionally, so that an older
type, like Neanderthal man, distinctly
shows stronger simian characters such as
smaller brain case and more projecting
orbital ridges, less chin and more jaw,
more curving thigh bones and more
opposed great toe, than a later type like
Cro-Magnon man. And the exhaustive
study of the collected thousands of speci-
34
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
mens of early man's handiwork have
enabled anthropologists to distinguish a
series of successive human cultural stages
distinguished by marked differences in
the amount of variety and degree of
elaboration of the weapons and tools and
ornaments made and used by prehistoric
man during Paleolithic, Neolithic and the
early metal ages. It is indeed remarkable
how far the students of prehistoric man
have been able to go in picturing, with a
high degree of presumptive correctness,
the major features in prehistoric human
life. They even know what other animals
he knew, both from actual remains of
these animals found in company with his
own bones and from the crude carvings
and drawings on cave walls made of
these animals by prehistoric man himself.
There are certain long limestone caverns
in southern France whose walls are veri-
table picture galleries of Cro-Magnon pre-
historic art. The students of prehistoric
man know also that many things that
were a part of human life as we first
35
HUMAN LIFE
know it historically formed no part of
human life in Pleistocene time. Among
the many thousand recovered specimens
of prehistoric man's handiwork, there is a
singular paucity of variety a few kinds
are repeated over and over again with
superficial changes which is a fact that
reveals the limited resources and variety
of occupations of this early human life.
But we must not follow this inviting
lead. Our aim in this discussion was
simply to point out those more important
facts in the biologist's knowledge which
bear on the problem of man's emergence
from the gray mists of prehistoric time
and the welter of strange animal life that
characterized those early days. And this
we have done.
36
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
THE BIOLOGIST AND PRESENT MAN
Now all this consideration of man's
origin prepares, even compels, the bio-
logical student of present-day human life
to recognize many characteristics of this
life as vestigial, that is, as carried over
from pre-human life and from prehistoric
human life. It compels him also to face
the fact, that if the human body and its
capacities are recognized as derived by
the more or less understood processes of
organic evolution from other lower animal
bodies and endowments, with no intro-
duction of supernatural means to give
human life qualitatively different capaci-
ties supernatural ones, they might be
called then he must not only expect to
find human life influenced by inherited
carry-overs from man's animal ancestors
but he must expect to find the human
body and its behavior and its fate subject
in greater or less degree to the influence
37
HUMAN LIFE
of all those general conditions and so-
called laws of biology such as those of
heredity, variation, selection, mutation,
growth, the influence of environment,
etc., which apply to all living things, to
all substance and capacities of substance
organized as living matter.
But he must be prepared to go even
farther. The biochemists and physicists
have made much progress recently in
showing that many of the long-accepted
familiar distinctions between living and
non-living matter must be given up and
that living matter is fundamentally only
a much more complex association or
state of the same substances that compose
other matter and that therefore it is
largely controlled in its behavior just as
other matter is controlled, namely, by
physical and chemical conditions and
stimuli. The Royal Society Christmas
lectures given in 1916-1917 before Lon-
don popular audiences by Dr. Arthur
Keith, the famous English anatomist,
physiologist, and anthropologist, have
38
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
recently been published in book form
under the title "The Engines of the
Human Body," and if you are interested
in knowing the essential likenesses be-
tween your body and a motorcycle read
this book. It at least reveals how the
modern biologist can plausibly describe
the body and its functions in the termi-
nology of mechanics and chemistry. So
that the biological student of human
life must be prepared to take constantly
into account the results of the investiga-
tions and the significance of the claims
of the upholders of the physico-chemical,
or mechanistic, conception of life.
Facing all this you can see how neces-
sary it is for the biological student of
human life to have, if he is not to be
carried off his feet at once into the camp
of the cynical and hopeless complete
mechanists, a wife and child at home to
return to from his laboratory. If I my-
self am not yet convinced that all of
humanism is to be dumped together with
all the rest of Nature into the common
39
HUMAN LIFE
pot of chemicalism it is chiefly owing to
my wife and child.
Not that I cannot recognize in them the
presence of bodies composed of engines,
and of living tissues and organs com-
posed of substances, mostly very complex,
but at bottom made up of the same
chemical elements which make up the
less complex substances of non-living
matter. Nor that I cannot perceive in
them the results of the influences of the
biological laws that I find also in the
various lower forms of life.
But I find mare in them, so much more
indeed, that although my scientific train-
ing and knowledge urge me to look on
this more as only quantitatively more,
my /common sense and general experience,
let alone my recognition of the limitations
of scientific knowledge, compel me to see
in them the manifestations of natural
possibilities so far removed from or in
advance of those manifestations as re-
vealed in non-living matter or in the
whole range of the rest of the world
40
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
of life, that, for all practical purposes,
these two human beings, and hence all
others, must be looked on as possessed
of at least some qualities and capacities
essentially different from those found
anywhere else in Nature.
But this is not at all to say that I must
recognize anything supernatural in these
qualities. They may simply be such
different and such extraordinary natural
qualities that all the study of the most
widely versed and wisest student of all
the rest of Nature will not enable him to
understand these special human qualities
and capacities on the basis of this study
alone. The scientist can be bigot just as
well as the theologian, politician, or any-
body else. And that scientist who would
pretend to say that because he has
studied Nature all his life and has fa-
miliarized himself with what has been
learned about Nature by all the other
naturalists, he can dogmatically declare
what are the limitations of natural possi-
bility, is simply a bigot. Just as are those
41
HUMAN LIFE
theologians or philosophers who without
having studied Nature at all pretend to
be able to say the same thing. However
extraordinary the special qualities that
I cannot but see in the human being, and
can never see in other kinds of living
beings, I am still not necessarily driven
to look on man as something out of or
beyond Nature. In fact I see so much in
him that is familiar elsewhere in Nature
that I would have quite as much difficulty
in explaining why this is so, if he is super-
natural, as I now have in trying to explain
all of him in terms of the Nature which is
revealed in studying physics, chemistry,
and the natural history of plants and the
lower animals.
Altogether, then, in approaching the
study of human life from the standpoint
of the biologist who is not a bigot, but
who is after all a biologist and not theo-
logian or metaphysician, we must take
fairly into account all that the study of
the rest of Nature allows us to make use
of in understanding certain aspects of
42
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
human life, and yet must guard ourselves
against the assumption that because we
understand the life of starfishes pretty
well we are sufficiently equipped with
knowledge to be confident of explaining
human life in terms of magnified starfish
life. Even if I can declare with almost
perfect certainty what will be the color
of the eyes of the children of two blue-
eyed parents, and with much confidence
what kind of mental equipment the
children of two congenitally feeble-minded
parents will have, because I am familiar
with a biological law discovered by a
naturalist who studied heredity in garden
peas, and because I have noted that this
law applies equally well to certain silk-
worm characters and, finally, to various
human traits, I am in no position to say
whether your children will believe in God
or not, be Republicans or Democrats or
Bolshevists, write poetry, or rob banks,
or live in settlement houses. I may be
able to make a fair prognosis of the de-
gree of resistance to tuberculosis which
43
HUMAN LIFE
your children will exhibit during their life
but I can make no least guess as to their
probability of dying in a future war with
Germany. I feel pretty certain about
what will happen to the human body after
death but whether that is the whole sig-
nificance of death in relation to a human
being, I, not being a scientific bigot, am
J not at all certain. I am not a spiritist
but if I claimed to be able to say that
there are and can be no spirits, I should
be claiming to know the whole order of
Nature. And that no naturalist, nor any-
one else, does know.
All that the naturalist can claim is that
he knows a part of the order of Nature,
and if some part of human life comes
within that known part of the order
of Nature then he insists that anyone
seriously considering human life must
take cognizance of this knowledge of
his. Men who in discussing the possi-
bility of a league of nations doing away
with war, argue against such possibility
on the assumed premises that fighting is
44
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
inherent in human nature and that human
nature does not change, are not taking
into account the biologist's certain knowl-
edge that human nature does change.
The educator or prison reformer who
claims that you can do anything with any
man by education and environment does
not take into account the biologist's
knowledge of the unescapable influence on
human fate of inherited traits. He
knows that it is perfectly true that you
cannot put a thousand dollar education
into a fifty dollar boy. But well meaning
people keep trying to do this all the time.
We have, then, to face, in our further
consideration of human life from the
point of view of the biologist, two rather
sharply contrasted things. One thing
is that the biologist does have a certain
positive knowledge of some conditions
or factors that do help to determine the
course of human life. The other thing
is that the course of human life is partly
determined by a set of conditions which
are, so far at least, quite outside the
45
HUMAN LIFE
v special knowledge of the biologist. He
can guess about them and wonder about
them just as other people do, but he has
no right to claim that he knows about
them. If some biologists do make this
claim it is probably because they are
carried away by the interesting sensation
of knowing anything at all about what
has been so long called "the mystery of
life." A famous biologist of the mechan-
istic-conception-of-life school once said
to me, as he saw me find my way to a
certain corner seat in a restaurant with
bench seats along the walls, that the
reason why I tried to find a corner seat
was because I was positively thigmo-
tropic, that is, that I was irresistibly im-
pelled, as a sand flea is, to get my body into
as much contact as possible with solid sur-
roundings. The fact is that I had made,
several days before, an appointment with
a friend to meet him in that corner.
The human being has such power of
dislocating his reactions to stimuli both as
regards time and space that his behavior
46
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
cannot be prophesied by any naturalist
with ever so complete knowledge of the
reflexes and tropisms exhibited by very
simple animals. That is, the inevitable
and immediate responses of Paramoecium
or houseflies or just hatched spiderlings
to physical and chemical stimuli, which
responses, in sum, compose their be-
havior, may have their vestiges in man
and do have certain parallels, as in the be-
havior of the internal organs and certain
external reflexes. But for the most part
man turns towards or away from light, or
finds a seat in a corner or out away from
the room walls, because he is influenced
by factors very different from simple
physical and chemical ones, factors which
may be of a week ago or a mile away. It
is these non-mechanistic factors or con-
ditions in human life, and their results,
that constitute that part of human life,
which is peculiarly the human part, that
the biologist must hesitate to be dogmatic
about. Yet this part must ever have a
seizing interest for him that is, if he
47
HUMAN LIFE
is himself human and not made over
by too much association with Paramoe-
cium to be more like his Protozoan pet
than like the rest of his own species.
In our continuing consideration of
human life, therefore, as the biologist
sees it, we shall not hesitate to touch upon
any of the phenomena and problems
presented by this life whether they be
clearly within the province which the
biologist can pretty confidently claim
as his, or in that other province which less
clearly belongs to him but which he may
believe he has at least as much right as
anyone else to venture into. He can at
least peer about in this other province to
see if any stray sheep of his own are to be
found in it. Certainly in many of the broad
problems of human life arising in connec-
tion with such subjects as education, mili-
tarism, eugenics, delinquency, and others
usually regarded as chiefly belonging to
the province of humanistics, he can readily
perceive biological aspects. That may be
his excuse for approaching them.
48
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
II
THE BIOLOGIST AND WAR
IN our preceding discussion we had a
fleeting glance at the evidence which
convinces the biologist that man is to be
regarded as an evolutionary derivation
from older and lower forms of life;
and hence that in attempting to under-
stand human life he must ever have an
eye open to the influences on it of the
persisting vestiges of earlier kinds of life
which are certainly in it. Also, if man is
to be regarded as in and a part of Nature
and not out of or beyond it, we must
be ready to recognize the part, however
large or small, played in determining his
fate by those biological factors or laws
which play so dominant a part in the
determination of the character and fate of
the lower animals.
But man by virtue of his social devel-
opment and educational inheritance has
49
HUMAN LIFE
gone so far above the lower animals in
his evolutionary progress, has become so
sublimated a kind of animal, reveals
such mysterious special powers and attri-
butes, that we must be very careful not to
imagine that we can understand his life
on the sole basis of ever so exhaustive a
knowledge of the life of the lower animals.
But the mysteries in his make-up need
not lead us to mysticism in our attempts
at their explanation. We would much
better be agnostic than mystic. At least
that is the position which the biologist
student of human life must take if he is to
stand consistently in line with his scien-
tific training and experience.
We may assume, then, that we have
adopted, in our present quest for knowl-
edge and understanding of human life, a
certain attitude, scientific, but open-
minded and not bigoted, and gained a
certain general orientation. With this
clearing of the atmosphere we are ready
to move forward in our quest. Too often
we make our start in studying human life
50
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
by throwing out a smoke-cloud in front
of us. What we need rather is as much
clearance of the atmosphere as possible.
I do believe science, rational science, not
bigoted science, gives us that.
How apparently baffled we stand at
present before the great problem of war.
How confusing and contradictory are the
statements vehemently made by the pro-
tagonists of differing beliefs concerning
it. There is no consensus of men regard-
ing it, not even regarding its desirability
or undesirability, let alone concerning its
inevitability or the possibility of doing
away with it.
I had during 1915 and 1916 a peculiar
opportunity of hearing set forth as ably,
probably, as the argument can be pre-
sented, the reasons which lead some men
to believe that war is not only inevitable
through all human existence but desir-
able. Part of this argument came to me
with special interest because it was based
on grounds of biology and biological
law. It came from certain officers of the
51
HUMAN LIFE
German General Staff living at German
Great Headquarters in Occupied France.
For several months, as chief representa-
tive of Mr. Hoover's relief organization
in Occupied France I had to live, by the
convention of agreement between us and
the German government, at this Head-
quarters, where all my activities could be
under the keen eyes of the German
General Staff. Out of this came my
special opportunity of hearing this argu-
ment from important sources, for in such
forced close association we necessarily
came to a status of more or less frank
exchange of opinions.
One of the Staff officers was in civil
life a professional biologist of much re-
pute, a professor of zoology in one of the
larger German universities whom I had
known years before in student days in
Leipzig. Other officers of higher military
rank but less academic training expressed
in more brutal terms the same argument,
but the professor-officer's speeches were
the more plausible as he understood
52
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
better the language and the theories of
biological evolution and was the better
able to anticipate and guard against the
reasoning that might be used by other
biologists to refute him. We had many
warm debates.
I tried during the war to tell the
American people, as far, at least, as it
might be reached through the Atlantic
Monthly, something of the nature of the
German arguments from biology why
there must always be war, why there
ought to be war, and even why Germany
should win in the war then being waged.
For I believed that Americans should
know something of this feeling and
attitude of the German people or of a
large, and certainly very influential, part
of them. I do not wish to repeat here, too
much of what I have presented in the
Atlantic articles. But we need, for the
purposes of our present discussion, to
recall the essential features of this claim,
for this argument from biology for the
inevitableness and even the desirability
53
HUMAN LIFE
of war has been used, and is used today,
by others than Germans.
The argument to which I have referred
is based on the assumption that natural
selection is the all-powerful factor, almost
the sole really important factor in organic
evolution. And that as man as an
animal species is subject to the control of
the same major evolutionary factors as
control the other animal kinds, his evolu-
tionary progress or fate is to be decided on
the basis of a rigid, relentless, natural
selection. It is the argument from a
post-Darwinian point of view that goes
much beyond Darwin's own concep-
tions.
Natural selection itself, as you know, is
the outcome of a bitter and persistent
struggle for existence, in which struggle
the fittest or fitter survive while the less
fit become either much modified or ex-
tinguished. This struggle has three chief
phases.
1. An inter-species struggle, or the
lethal competition among different animal
54
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
kinds for food, space, and opportunity to
increase;
2. An intra-species struggle, or lethal
competition among the individuals of a
single species, resultant on the over-
production due to natural multiplication
by geometric progression; and
3. The constant struggle of individuals
and species against the rigors of climate,
the danger of storm, flood, drought, cold,
and heat.
Now any animal kind and its individ-
uals may be continually exposed to all of
these phases of the struggle for existence,
or, on the other hand, any one or more
of these phases may be largely amelio-
rated or even abolished for a given species
and its individuals. This amelioration
may come about through a happy acci-
dent of time or place, or because of the
adoption by the species of a habit or mode
of life that continually protects it from
a certain phase of the struggle.
For example, the voluntary or involun-
tary migration of representatives of a
55
HUMAN LIFE
species hard pressed to exist in its native
habitat, may release it from the too
severe rigors of a destructive climate,
or take it beyond the habitat of its
most dangerous enemies, or give it the
needed space and food for the support
of a numerous progeny. Thus, such a
single phenomenon as migration might
ameliorate any one or more of the sev-
eral phases of the struggle for exist-
ence.
Again, the adoption by two widely dis-
tinct and perhaps originally antagonistic
species of a commensal or symbiotic
life, based on the mutual-aid principle-
thousands of such cases are familiar to
naturalists would ameliorate or abolish
the inter-specific struggle between these
two species. Even more effective in the
modification of the influence due to a bit-
ter struggle for existence, is the adoption
by a species of a social or communistic
mode of existence so far as its own in-
dividuals are concerned. This, of course,
would largely ameliorate for that species
56
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
the intra-specific phase of its struggle for
life.
As a matter of fact, this reliance by
animal kinds for success in the world upon
a more or less extreme adoption of the
mutual-aid principle, as contrasted with
the mutual-fight principle, is much more
widely spread among the lower animals
than familiarly recognized, while in the
case of man, it has been, in connection
with high brain development and the
acquirement of the power of speaking
and writing, the greatest single factor in
the achievement of his proud biological
position as king of living creatures.
Altruism or mutual aid, as the biol-
ogists prefer to call it, to escape the
implication of assuming too much con-
sciousness in it is just as truly a funda-
mental biologic factor of evolution as is
the cruel, strictly self -regarding, extermi-
nating kind of struggle for existence with
which the Neo-Darwinists try to fill our
eyes and ears to the exclusion of the
recognition of all other factors.
57
HUMAN LIFE
This mutual aid, as a biologic or natural
factor, has influenced materially, as I
have said, the mode of life, the biologic
success and the character of the evolution
of many kinds of lower animals. In their
case it was not we presume consciously
chosen or consciously developed. In the
case of man, however, where also mutual
aid has been a fundamental factor in
determining the mode of life and the
success and character of the evolution of
the species, and where in the beginning
also it may have been entirely uncon-
sciously taken on, we face an important
new thing in relation to it; that is its con-
scious development. Indeed, it is the high
development of mutual aid plus a high
degree of brain power plus the existence of
something we call spirit or soul in man,
all of these interacting on each other to
the advantage of the further development
of each, that really distinguishes man from
other animals and makes him human.
This conscious development of mutual
aid, or altruism, by man demands some
58
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
further consideration in connection with
our present consideration of the problem
of war as the biologist faces it.
An essential thing to keep in mind in
this connection is that man differs mark-
edly from other animal kinds in having
two kinds of inheritance often confused
because of the use of the common term,
inheritance, for both kinds. He has a bi-
ological inheritance this is real heredity,
inherent in him and responsible for much
of his physical and mental condition, and
for that instinctive behavior, partly in-
dispensable for the actual maintenance
of his life and health, as in the obvious
cases of the suckling of babes and the
winking of the eyelids and the less no-
ticed actions of his internal organs,
but partly no longer indispensable, in
his present stage of evolution, as in the
cases of various brute performances, once
necessary to his self-preservation. He
has also a social inheritance, not a part of
his heredity, but playing a very important
and conspicuous role in his life, especially
59
HUMAN LIFE
in his less material, his higher life as we
are accustomed to call it, in other words
the part of his life that especially charac-
terizes and makes especially worth while
being human. Man is not born with this
social inheritance in him as his biological
inheritance is in him, but with it all
about him, ready for him and certain to
be, in some measure, imposed on him.
He is born into it rather than with it in
him.
This social inheritance consists of tradi-
tion, of recorded history, of precept and
example, in a word, of education. It is
possible because of mutual aid and speech,
writing and printing. Other animals, es-
pecially a few of the higher ones, may
also enjoy a certain social inheritance,
but man's social inheritance is so incom-
parably greater and more important in
determining the character of his life, that
he is in this respect practically qualita-
tively different from all other animals.
Now with all this in his eyes the biol-
ogist interested in the problem of the
60
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
inevitability of war and the desirability
of it sees the situation as reducible to
rather simple terms. If man prefers to
be ruled in his relation to fighting and
war by his biological inheritance with
its vestigial carry-overs from prehuman
and prehistoric human days, and does
not care to oppose to it his power of
conscious development and magnification
of his social inheritance to the end of
making it victor over his brute heredity
something that he has successfully done
in relation to many other things then
war will persist. If he decides, as the
Germans seemed to, that the best way
to develop the highest type of man and
human culture is to depend solely on
the natural selection based on a ruth-
less physical life-or-death determining
struggle for existence, with a survival and
dominance of the physically strongest,
then war is desirable.
But if he recognizes that he must take
into account in his study of human
development another evolution factor, not
61
HUMAN LIFE
less natural, and of proved effectiveness,
which is based on the mutual aid principle
instead of the mutual murder principle,
and one which can be backed by all the
force of social inheritance to counteract
certain opposing influences of biological
inheritance, then war need be to him
neither inevitable nor desirable.
The protagonists of inevitable war
declare that human nature does not
change. The biologist declares that
human nature does change both by
virtue of the influences of strictly
biological factors and especially, more
rapidly, by virtue of the influences of
social inheritance. Human nature to-
day, which is certainly not the same as
human nature in early Glacial Time, is
quite as much the resultant of the work
of social inheritance factors as it is of
factors of biological inheritance. Human
nature, not just the part that is in-
herited, but the whole of it, including
the part that is acquired by each gen-
eration, not only changes but can be made
62
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
to change in definite direction by educa-
tion, and it can be made to change with
reasonable rapidity, a rapidity that seems
very rapid indeed to the biologist accus-
tomed to see change mostly depend on
slowly modified heredity.
HUMAN LIFE
HEREDITY AND HUMAN PROBLEMS
THIS all too slight discussion and all
of our discussion can be only sugges-
tive, not exhaustive of biological and
social inheritance in connection with the
war problem, brings us naturally to a
consideration of certain other problems
of human life in connection with which
this distinction between biological and
social inheritance, and their conflict and
relative importance, are of special in-
terest.
It has been so much the fashion lately
to emphasize the importance of a consid-
eration of purely biological conditions
and laws in the discussions of human
problems a wise fashion, undoubtedly
that some too hasty and thoughtless
readers and hearers of such discussions
may have gained the impression that the
only biology to consider in this connection
was the biology which one learns from a
64
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
study of the behavior and evolution of
kinds of life lower than human-kind.
Some biologists have helped spread this
impression.
But they do wrong to do this. They are
misled by their desire for simplist or
monist explanations. It is a great econ-
omy of thought, a good example of the
Occam's Razor principle, to push toward
a monist explanation of natural phenom-
ena. The German war philosophy, if it
was an honest philosophy and with many
Germans it was honest, was a monist
philosophy. If natural selection can and
does explain the evolution of plant and
animal life and if man is only a form,
rather unusually complex, of animal life,
then his evolution, too, is to depend on
this ruthless all-powerful natural selec-
tion.
Well, even granting both premises
and the first one cannot be granted
the conclusion is wrong: man has more
in his life than is in the life of sea-urchins,
birds, or apes. And this more does
65
HUMAN LIFE
not necessarily mean something more
than or different from biology although
many of you probably believe that it
does. The biology of man is much more
than and different from the biology of
other animals because of the social in-
heritance element in it if for no other
reason.
The biologists who help lead us to the
fascinating but, I think, false belief that
human biology is to be all understood
some time on the basis of lower animal
biology alone, that all that is in man
is in lower animals although in much
simpler terms, have let their zeal and
enthusiasm make them overlook the
revelations that their wives and children,
their friends and their own selves make
to them every day. The trouble is they
leave their philosophic consideration of
human life to their laboratory hours.
They give up being philosophers when
they get home and become just human
beings, taking things as they come and
thinking about them in different terms.
66
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
They think about them in terms of money
and trouble and pleasure, and love and
hate, and personal hopes and chagrins,
which are peculiarly human terms. That
is why I repeated so many times in my
first lecture, and repeat now again, that
we biologists must take into account in all
our looking at human life the things
that we see at home as well as the things
we see in the laboratory. If we do not we
overlook the greatest things in the great-
est problems of human life, the things
that really make human life human.
But let us turn now to one or two more
of those problems which especially involve
in their consideration this matter, in-
troduced by our reference to the war
problem, of the two kinds of inheritance
and the relations between them.
The problem that I have especially
in mind at this moment introduces con-
spicuously the subject of human heredity.
Is a man what he is because he is born so ?
or because he becomes so by education,
using education in the broad sense of
67
HUMAN LIFE
including all environment? Of course
this is the old, old problem of nature and
nurture, already threshed out, one might
imagine, to its last possible degree. But
if that were true for yesterday it is not
true for today, for the reason that we
are daily, almost, finding out new things
about heredity. Since the beginning of
this century we have learned more that
seems to be fact about heredity, plant
and animal heredity in general and hu-
man heredity in particular, than had been
learned in all previous time.
In the 1860's an Augustinian monk
named Gregor Mendel, living in a clois-
ter in Brunn in Moravian Austria and
possessed not only of a divine humility
and devotion but of the divine spark
of scientific curiosity, or as we call it in
scientific circles, research, carried on an
extensive lot of experiments in the cloister
garden in the way of hybridizing various
races of garden peas; he was a Moravian
Burbank. He read an account of his
observations and conclusions before the
68
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
local natural history of Brunn and they
were published as two brief papers in the
obscure proceedings of this obscure soci-
ety of local naturalists. And there they
lay apparently unnoticed for thirty years.
Odd how an epoch-making thing can be
put into the world, and lie unnoticed for a
third of a century!
In 1900 three eminent European bot-
anists, one in Austria, one in Germany
and one in Holland, working separately
on heredity problems, each independently
and all almost simultaneously, discovered
and made known Mendel's work. Today
Mendelian inheritance, Mendelism and
Mendel are words of almost as much
significance to naturalists as Darwinian
selection, Darwinism and Darwin.
With the work and theories of Mendel
and the three botanists, Tschermak,
Correns and De Vries, as stimulus and
basis, there has been an energetic pushing
on of heredity studies, with a rapid
gaining of many facts and much under-
standing until now we are able con-
69
HUMAN LIFE
fidently to make statements about the
heredity mechanism and behavior really
startling in their preciseness and practical
importance. We can make enough proph-
ecies about the outcome of many cases
of mating to give us sufficient basis to
warrant us in modifying our social in-
heritance in directions to increase ad-
vantages or decrease disadvantages de-
rived from biological inheritance.
Before Mendel and the post-Mendel-
ians, about the only so-called law of
heredity that had been formulated was
Galton's generalization to the effect that
an individual receives one-half of his
inheritance from his two parents, one-
fourth from his four grandparents, one-
eighth from his eight great grandparents,
one-sixteenth from his sixteen great,
great grandparents and so on by de-
creasing fractions back to the beginning
of ancestors, the total of these fractions
equalling 1, or the total biological inheri-
tance of the individual. Very interesting,
but not very specific as to just what
70
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
particular traits, physical and mental
and Galton was almost the first to include
mental traits in heredity on the same
basis as physical traits interesting, I
say, but not very specific as to just what
particular traits one is going to get in the
respective J^, J4, Y& etc., from the
respective parents, grandparents, great
grand-parents, et al. And that is really
what we burn to know.
I remember a red-headed boy among
my early companions whose parents were
brown-haired, and this boy used to won-
der why he was red-headed. By constant
reminders we never let him cease wonder-
ing. Finally his parents discovered that
back in the ancestral line there had
existed another shock of flame. And
parents and red-haired son were satisfied
to say that he was a "throw-back" to
great grandfather William; red hair was a
part of the one-eighth of his inheritance
that the boy got from his great grand-
parents.
Mendelism makes no such broad gen-
71
HUMAN LIFE
eralizations as Gallon's but it makes
much more precise ones. It does not
treat of halves or quarters or eighths of
one's whole inheritance but of the inheri-
tance of specific characters, as hair-form,
eye-color, susceptibility or resistance to
particular disease, and feeble-mindedness.
I am talking of human traits and human
heredity now. Among plants it treats
of leaf shape, flower pattern, height of
stem, and other characters. Among
silkworms it treats of larval coloration
and pattern, color of cocoon, number of
generations a year, and others. And so
on. I might make a long list of specific
traits, structural and physiological, in a
long list of plant and animal species, and a
rather impressive list for the human spe-
cies, about the inheritance of which quite
specific and precise things can be affirmed
as a result of the intensive study of
heredity that has been done in the last
twenty years.
All of these things are interesting and
some are both interesting and useful.
72
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
You can see the utility to the breeder of
silkworms if I am able to say to him that
if he will cross a silkworm moth of a
certain race which spins yellow silk with
one from a certain white-silk spinning
race and it makes no difference whether
the male or the female be either of the
white or the yellow silk race; there is no
factor of sex-potency in the outcome he
will get a progeny of silkworms all of
which spin yellow cocoons, but that if for
a second generation he mates two of these
yellow-spinners together he will get a
brood of which three-fourths will spin
yellow cocoons and one-fourth white
cocoons, while if for a third generation he
mates two of these white spinners together
he will get a brood all of which will spin
white, and only white cocoons, while if he
mates all of the yellow spinners inside
their group he will get from one-third of
these matings broods which spin nothing
but yellow cocoons but from two-thirds
of them broods which spin both yellow
and white cocoons in the precise propor-
73
HUMAN LIFE
tion of three-fourths spinning yellow and
one-fourth spinning white I say if I
can tell a silk grower these things as
facts which he can rely on and I can
actually do this as a result of my own
experiments and observations he will
find them not only interesting but useful.
Think what such knowledge of heredity
means to the plant and animal breeder.
And then think of what similar knowledge
concerning the inheritance of human
traits may mean in human life.
The example I have given of the hered-
ity behavior of a certain silkworm charac-
teristic is a case of typical Mendelian
inheritance. The inheritance of blue or
brown eyes in men follows the same
course; so does six and five-fingeredness;
so does a certain form of color blindness
paired with color visualness; so does
Huntington's chorea paired with freedom
from this fatal infirmity; so does, although
in less perfect form, feeble-mindedness
paired with full-mindedness. Mendelian
inheritance is the order or behavior of the
74
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
heredity of specific unit characters. Not
all traits are inherited according to the
Mendelian order, but many are. This
order can be found out if it exists and
then predicted.
It must be found out by experiment
(in lower animals and plants) or observa-
tion (in human beings) for each specific
trait in each species of plant and animal
and for man. The order cannot be
predicted for another species on the
basis of knowledge in one species; nor for
man on a basis of knowledge in lower
animals. The inheritance of each trait is
independent of the inheritance of any
other trait, with the exception of occa-
sional yoked or grouped traits which
behave as a single unit. It is unit inheri-
tance where single characteristics are the
units, not fractional inheritance where all
the traits or the whole individual is the
unit. It will take a long time to work out
the order of heredity for all the Mendeliz-
ing traits, physical and mental, which
the human species possesses, but it can be
75
HUMAN LIFE
done; and then we can bring to bear the
power of our social inheritance to make
human life rapidly better by encouraging
the good and discouraging the bad in
biological inheritance.
But we do not have to wait until we
know the order of inheritance for all our
traits before we can begin to use wisely
this new knowledge of heredity that
began with the revelations of the Augus-
tinian monk Mendel about the inheri-
tance of stem length and pod shape and
seed coat of garden peas. We can begin
on a basis of the knowledge of the heredity
behavior of a single trait. Let me give
you an example.
For a long time the characters consid-
ered in studies of heredity were exclu-
sively physical ones. Just as in the
beginning days of anatomical study man's
body was considered too sacred to be
submitted to dissection, so in the begin-
ning days of heredity study man's mental
traits were considered too sacred for
scientific analysis. It was Galton, as I
76
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
have already said, who first, in any con-
spicuous way, included mentality along
with physical characters, as subject of
studies in biological inheritance. In-
deed he gave more attention to the in-
heritance of mental capacity than to that
of physical traits. His first important
book on inheritance is called "Hered-
itary Genius." It is interesting to note,
in passing, that Galton's studies and their
publication were made after Mendel had
done his work, but before Mendel's work
had been discovered and made known to
the world.
Ever since Galton, students of human
heredity have paid attention to the in-
heritance of mental traits and general
mental capacity. It is a fascinating thing
to trace the descent of genius or great
talent through the succeeding generations
of a family. The Bach family contributed
fifty notable musicians to the world in
five generations. The death of the
astronomer K. H. Struve a few months
ago called attention to the fact that his
77
HUMAN LIFE
father and grandfather, Otto and F. G.
W. Struve, respectively, were also em-
inent astronomers, all three having been
gold medalists of the Royal Astronomical
Society. Three sons of Charles Darwin
have shown mental capacity above the
average.
But if unusual mental capacity is
heritable so also is unusual mental in-
capacity, and because marked incapacity
becomes a social danger or, at least,
burden, much special study has been
given it in recent years. The matter
interests not only students of heredity,
but sociologists, educators, and criminol-
ogists. For mental incapacity or in-
sufficiency revealed in children as marked
backwardness and feeble-mindedness per-
sists in adults as feeble-mindedness and
imbecility, and poses a series of grave
problems concerning the social relations
of these unfortunates.
One of the most interesting practical
outcomes of this intensive study of mental
sub-normalcy has been the development
78
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
of ingenious intelligence tests, with point
scales, by which a definite rating for
intelligence can be determined for any
individual. These tests were first devised
for children but modifications of them
have been used for adults. An extensive
use of these tests, with highly successful
results, was made during the war for
rating American soldiers and officers.
Indeed the success of this method of
testing and expressing intelligence has
been one of the most brilliant and useful
modern contributions of psychology to
practical life.
An interesting and useful feature in
connection with the tests is the expression
of their results in terms of mental age
which may be contrasted at once with the
actual age of the individuals tested, so
that the degree of mental retardation or
advancement is made manifest in readily
understandable terms. Thus a child of
12 years of age may be found to have a
mental age of but 8 years, meaning that
the intelligence of this 12 year old child
79
HUMAN LIFE
is only on a par with the intelligence
of an average normal child of eight. In
addition, as the mental age indicates
only the general level to which the
intelligence of the individual has devel-
oped at the time the tests are applied, a
measure of the actual rate of mental
development of the subject, called the
"intelligence quotient," is used. This
intelligence quotient is the percentage
ratio between the mental and chronologi-
cal age of the subject. Repeated tests
of the same children at intervals of one to
four years have indicated that the in-
telligence quotient of a given child re-
mains practically constant between the
ages of ten and sixteen years. By reason
of its relative stability, therefore, the
intelligence quotient becomes a reliable
and useful index of intelligence. Once
determined, it is possible to predict by it,
within reasonable limits, the probable
level to which a given individual's in-
telligence will develop. From a rather
wide experience of these specific ratings
80
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
of mental age and intelligence quotient,
certain general categories of mental ca-
pacity or incapacity have been established
and are now commonly used by psychol-
ogists. At bottom is the category feeble-
minded, then, in ascending order, border-
line, dull-normal, average-normal and
superior.
Much special study has been given
feeble-mindedness by students of heredity
in the last decade and it has been fairly
satisfactorily proved that this mental
condition is not only an inherited con-
dition, but that it may be looked on as a
unit human trait following the general
Mendelian order as regards its mode of
inheritance. If this is really so and it is
hardly any longer open to doubt it has
obviously a most important significance
in connection with the whole problem
of education. It must make us face
squarely the situation that there are
limits to the educability of certain in-
dividuals and that we should somewhere
call a halt on the vain efforts we are
81
HUMAN LIFE
making to put the same kind and
amount of education into all kinds of
pupils.
This fact of the heritability of feeble-
mindedness has also an important sig-
nificance in connection with a particular
social problem, that of juvenile delin-
quency, for it has been proved beyond
much doubt by the studies of Goddard,
Davenport, Kuhlmann, Williams and
others that feeble-mindedness and delin-
quency are all too often closely linked in
terms of cause and effect. Dr. Williams
has recently published the detailed re-
sults of an exhaustive study made by him
of 470 delinquent boys (ages 6 to 22 years)
in California. His monograph is the
record of an admirable piece of investiga-
tion conducted in an unprejudiced and
rigorously scientific manner, with care
to consider all the details and possible
influence of environment as well as of
heredity on the subjects of his study.
Its results can be expressed in few words,
and they are results which are confirmed
82
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
by a large amount of similar investigation,
especially those of Goddard.
Williams finds that about one-third
of his juvenile delinquents are feeble-
minded and that nearly one-half are
border line or dull-normal in mental
rating, while only about one-fifth are
average-normal or superior. If the per-
centage of the various mental rating
classes in two groups of California boys
of similar ages are compared, one group
being Williams' 470 delinquents and the
other a group of one thousand boys taken
at random from all classes of the popula-
tion, we note the following suggestive
facts: Superior rating, delinquent group,
3%, miscellaneous group, 20%; average-
normal rating, delinquent group, 19%,
miscellaneous, 60%; dull-normal rating,
delinquent, 21%, miscellaneous, 10%;
border-line rating, delinquent, 27%, mis-
cellaneous, 8%; feeble-minded, delin-
quent, 30%, miscellaneous, 2%. The
association of feeble-mindedness with ju-
venile delinquency is positive.
83
HUMAN LIFE
But not all delinquency is due to feeble-
mindedness. In Williams' group of delin-
quent boys, 19% are rated as of average
normal intelligence and 3% of superior
intelligence. Altogether, in Dr. Williams'
judgment, about one-third of California
juvenile delinquency, which is a first step
toward confirmed adult criminality, is
due to hereditary mental deficiency, an-
other third to other undesirable inherited
traits and the final third to unfortunate
environmental conditions. There are,
then, two kinds of causes of juvenile
delinquency, and two kinds of remedies
are required to combat these causes; one a
remedy of better environment, the other a
remedy of being better born. Which is a
natural introduction to a few words on the
general subject of eugenics.
Poor word eugenics, and such a good
word, too. But the comic papers and
comic stage and the sadly comic capers of
the all too serious cranks and all too un-
wise and too extreme would-be friends
have made this good word almost im-
84
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
possible; much more, they have seriously
hurt the repute of the really good idea it
stands for. To be well born is certainly an
excellent thing to achieve; anyone con-
templating being born would like to
arrange it. Racial well-being is certainly
an advantageous thing for a race; any
people would like to possess it. Well,
eugenics means these things, not surgi-
cal sterilization of men or women, state
controlled breeding of children, abolish-
ment of love, or any or all of these or the
other special exaggerations or ugly fancies
which have been made synonyms of
eugenics by humorists, scoffers, or cranks. /
Eugenics bases its claim as a subject V
for reasonable and sympathetic considera-
tion on two grounds: first, the acknowl-
edged power or influence of heredity for
good or ill in helping to determine hu-
man fate; and, second, the acknowledged
power which we have in education for
encouraging good and discouraging bad
human heredity. The great recent in-
crease in extent and precision of our
85
HUMAN LIFE
knowledge of heredity adds materially to
the possibility of making eugenics a sub-
ject entirely worth serious and active con-
sideration. The more we know of the
mechanism, the order and the results of
biological inheritance, the more we can
develop and make use of a social inheri-
tance which shall help to make individuals
and peoples better born.
Guyer in his excellent little book, en-
titled "Being Well-Born," gives a striking
example of what bad and good inheritance
can mean by giving the facts in the case
of two lines of descent; one, which we
may call Line A, came from a normal
father mated to a feeble-minded mother
and the other, Line B, from the same
normal father mated to a normal mother.
In five generations of Line A, 480 direct
descendants included 143 known to be
feeble-minded, 291 of unknown or doubt-
ful mentality, 36 illegitimate, 33 sexually
immoral, 24 confirmed alcoholics, 3 epi-
leptics, 3 criminals, 8 keepers of dis-
reputable houses, 82 dead as infants,
86
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
and only 46 known to be of normal
mentality and character. In five genera-
tions of Line B, 496 descendants were all,
with but one exception, which was a case
of religious mania, of normal mentality.
But two were alcoholics and none was
epileptic or criminal. Only 15 children
died in infancy. Practically all the mem-
bers of this line were good representative
citizens including judges, lawyers, doctors,
educators, business men, etc.
The notorious Jukes, Kallikak, Nam,
Piney, and Zero families, the Tribe of
Ishmael, the Hill Folk, and the descen-
dants of Margaret, Mother of Criminals,
which have been studied by various
students of heredity, show conclusively
what bad heredity can do for individuals
and society. It is estimated that the
Jukes family alone, with its 300 profes-
sional paupers, 440 physical wrecks from
debauchery, 50 prostitutes, 60 habitual
thieves, 7 murderers, and 130 other
convicts out of a total of 1200 identi-
fied descendants, has cost the state of
87
HUMAN LIFE
New York over a million dollars for the
care of its criminal, defective and immoral
members. We may deem it fortunate for
us, and for them, that 300 of its known
progeny died in infancy.
To be a eugenist does not necessarily
mean to be a crank. It means to be a
person interested in such tangible revela-
tions as I have just referred to of the
wholesale misery and social injury possi-
ble from bad heredity, and willing to
approve and actively support whatever
can be done wisely by education and legal
provision to prevent repetition of this
sort of thing. It means to be a person
willing to use common sense, scientific
knowledge, and prevision for the good of
his own family, society, and the race.
Karl Pearson has pointed out that one-
half of England's new generation is being
produced by the most hereditarily un-
fortunate one-fourth of England's popula-
tion. Bad heredity is outstripping good
heredity in England. No amount of
after education or good environment can
88
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
make good this fundamental bad start in
life. A growing national recognition of
this alarming situation is perhaps the
reason that eugencics has been less
laughed at in England than elsewhere.
89
HUMAN LIFE
THE BIOLOGIST AND THE PUBLIC
Now these matters of war and juvenile
delinquency and racial well-being which
I have referred to are all important
problems in human life and to all of them
the biologist can admittedly make some
enlightening contribution. They are but
three examples of the many problems of
human life with obvious and fundamen-
tal biological aspects. But how little has
the world, although intensely interested
in these problems and anxiously trying
to solve them, taken any advantage of
the special knowledge offered by the
biologist in connection with them. And
this in spite of the fact that it has been
in recent years quite the fashion to invite
the biologist to talk about such problems
and even to listen to him with a tolerant
interest. But why the fashion of listening
to his advice and at the same time the
fashion of not acting on it? Well, it is not
90
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
all the fault of the public: it is partly the
fault of the biologist.
In the first place, the biologist too usu-
ally finds much difficulty in making him-
self understood by the public. He seems
unable to escape from the use of a ter-
minology that is included only in the
larger dictionaries and these dictionaries
are at home while the public is in the
lecture hall. Hence the people who listen
to him go away confused and incapable
of doing what the biologist thinks he
has suggested to them to do. There are
hundreds of interesting and pertinent facts
of biology that are today waiting intel-
ligible telling in order to be made use of!
In the second place the biologist appar-
ently has difficulty in estimating the
varying degrees of practicalness of his
knowledge. His facts and his recom-
mendations run all the gamut from
tangible practicability to most academic
impracticability. Take the very examples
I have used this evening! If the biologist
has nothing more to contribute to the
91
HUMAN LIFE
discussion of the tremendously important
and pressing problem of war than the
assurance that human evolution will carry
us beyond war in another geologic epoch
or two, he may be listened to with tolerant
interest but he will start nothing to help
put an end to war. Of .course I think that
he really has more to offer. I have even
tried to indicate what it is that he can
suggest, namely, to fight the false notion
that human evolution must be left to
natural selection, and that war produces
natural selection as a matter of fact war
produces artificial selection more than
natural selection and a bad or reversed
artificial selection at that. He can also
encourage the right notion that biological
inheritance, especially where already ves-
tigial, can be largely offset by social
inheritance.
In fact, it is social evolution, not bio-
logical evolution, that we must chiefly
look to for future human progress. Most
anthropologists agree that the major
difference between present man and prim-
92
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
itive man not man of the Ice Age but
primitive man of late prehistoric and
historic times lies in the possession by
present man of methods and technic
based on scientific knowledge not pos-
sessed by primitive man. And modern
man has gained over primitive man with
ever increased acceleration. His move-
ment of advance has been like that of a
snowball rolling faster as it gets bigger.
Many biologists believe that man is
already so specialized an end product of
his evolutionary line, that as regards
physical change and actual mental ca-
pacity he has reached the standing-still
stage. Certainly man today as individual
is not to be regarded as superior to man
of early historic times, of the times of
Greek greatness or probably even of the
times of early Egypt and Asia-Minor.
In connection with the matter of
juvenile delinquency and racial well-
being the biologist's contribution of facts
and suggestions are of tangible prac-
ticability. The biologist says that the
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HUMAN LIFE
normal man who married the feeble-
minded woman and started a line of
descendants of whom four out of five were
socially incompetent and hence burdens
and dangers to society, and then married
a normal woman and started another
line of descendants all socially competent,
should have been prevented from making
the first mating. Don't call this eugenics ;
call it an application of scientific knowl-
edge and common sense. Think of it as
just as important and just as possible as
the enforced isolation of a victim of in-
fectious disease, or of homicidal mania.
But not all the problems of human life
in the discussion of which the biologist
ventures to take part exhibit so clearly
as the examples thus far referred to, their
biological aspects. The approach of the
biologist to these other problems, even
his right to approach them, becomes
more debatable but for that very rea-
son, perhaps, more interesting. Can the
biologist with his methods of analysis
and his knowledge of other kinds of life
94
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
than human life, make any, even least,
contribution to that which most of us
demand first from existence, namely,
personal happiness? Can he show us
wiser ways of living? He can unques-
tionably show us safer ways; he can help
guide us in our constant great gamble of
betting our lives on what we know. And
presumably that alone is quite worth our
calling on him to give us the benefit of
his special knowledge, and his reasoned
recommendations. But merely being
safer amid danger, merely continuing to
live and living longer, is not what many,
very many of us, are chiefly concerned
with. We want continuing to live to
mean something continually larger. We
yearn for encouragement of our hopes, for
inspiration to struggle on to achieve what
we can hardly define but clearly feel intent
on. Has the biologist anything helpful to
suggest about this? Or will listening to
him mean more pessimism, hopelessness,
fatalism? If so perhaps we would prefer
to be blindly hopeful, ignorantly happy.
95
HUMAN LIFE
m
THE BIOLOGIST AND EVERYDAY
LIFE
IN our preceding discussions we became
acquainted with certain facts which con-
tribute in some degree to help solve the
problem of human origin and the place in
Nature of humankind. And we noted
certain other facts which help to reveal
the kind and extent of the influence on
human behavior of some of those biolog-
ical factors whose influence on the life of
other animals is so obvious to the student
of general biology.
In recognizing these facts we have at
the same time recognized the necessity of
taking account, in any candid study of
human life, of the special significance of
these facts, which is, simply, that the
human species, however different it may
seem or actually be from other forms of
life, is not so different as to be something
96
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
outside of Nature, unrelated to other
kinds of creatures, and hence to be
studied quite apart from other forms of
life. Indeed, in face of the many facts
that have been revealed concerning man's
relation to other extinct and living crea-
tures and concerning the degree of control
exercised over his body and behavior by
natural law, it is most puzzling to me to
note to what an extent there still exists,
among many persons of sufficient educa-
tion to have had these facts brought to
their attention, a disregard of the neces-
sary significance of these facts. I can
understand, although I do not share, a
certain feeling of repugnance to accepting
the situation forced on us by scientific
fact and logical induction. I can sym-
pathize with, although not accept, the
position of those who persist in wishing
and trying to look on themselves and
humankind in general as of a different
clay endowed with a different breath and
existing in a different sphere from the
rest of life. I can feel the egocentric
97
HUMAN LIFE
urge that leads to this position perhaps
as strongly as those who take it, but I
cannot surrender to it as easily. Scien-
tific observation and cool reason prevent.
How can one accept eagerly and grate-
fully that knowledge about our bodily
make-up and functioning which the biol-
ogist gives us, and, on the basis of it,
proceed to modify our behavior so as to
protect ourselves from accident and dis-
ease, and help ourselves in the attempt
to adapt ourselves to the actual condi-
tions of the world we live in, and yet
reject other no less well demonstrated
facts of the same general category brought
to us by the same biologist, but the ac-
ceptance of which involves a recognition
on our part of our true place in Nature.
I am inclined to find an explanation for
this popular inconsistency in two or three
different causes. For one thing some
biologists have gone ahead of the actual
facts with their justifiable significance
and have presented the world with hy-
potheses instead of demonstrations and
98
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
have insisted on an acceptance of un-
justifiable significance. I have already
called attention to the too bold assump-
tions of the extreme disciples of the
mechanistic school of life. For another
thing one can never get away from letting
one's own observations, with all their
limitations both as to scope and accuracy,
play a too large part in determining one's
judgments about any matter however
technical, and however demanding, for
correct understanding, of a certain special
training and equipment on the part of
the observer. This is one of the reasons
why the professors of political economy
and sociology have such a hard row to
hoe. Everyone is his own economist and
sociologist, because the subjects are per-
force under everyone's observation, al-
though this observation may really be
very limited and usually is of a most
untrained and unmethodical kind. Pro-
fessors of astronomy on the other hand
are accepted unhesitatingly as authorities;
so few of us have telescopes.
HUMAN LIFE
Now the biologists have a position
between these extremes. When they
talk about microbes and Dinosaurs their
statements are accepted at face value.
But when they talk about human beings,
which the biologist can study quite as
carefully as he can other kinds of beings,
there are reservations. When the biol-
ogists' talk about human beings is limited
to statements about lungs and liver,
skeleton and ductless glands, it is not
questioned. But when their talk is about
the behavior of human beings, about
their psychology, their heredity, their
responses to environment and education,
and their position in Nature, then their
talk is tested by the miscellaneous per-
sonal observations and prejudices and
desires and hopes and beliefs of each
individual, and it is accepted or not as it
confirms or contradicts each one's notions
derived from these things. We all, or
most of us, think we know human beings
as well as the biologist does. Most
assuredly the biologist does not know all
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AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
that is to be known about human beings,
and about that which he does not know
we must certainly be permitted to accept
our own guess as likely to be as good as
his. But we are too likely to think our
own guess even better than his.
This attitude comes largely, I think,
from a feeling, after hearing the biologist
talk about human life, that his considera-
tion of this life is too academic, too
technical, too detached from most of
those things that make up our immediate
interests and fill our present moments.
As important as war may be, and juvenile
delinquency and eugenics and the rela-
tions of social inheritance to biological
inheritance, and as interesting as may
be the problems of human origin and the
relation of the human species to other
animal kinds, all of which are samples,
as I have indicated in our earlier dis-
cussions, of the things the biologist-
student of human life especially talks
about, these are not the matters of
human life that occupy most of the atten-
101
HUMAN LIFE
tion of most human beings most of the
days. The matters that do so occupy
our principal attention are our work and
recreation, our clothes and food, our
household affairs, our health and our
looks, our income, expenditures and sav-
ings, the growing up of our children and
the growing old of ourselves, our family
and social relations, our personal con-
tacts with people and our opinions of
them. We think and talk about books
and music and pictures, about railways
and bridges and motor cars, about scenery
and climate and hotels, about politics
and diplomacy and governments. And
all the time we give a fascinated attention
to the particular human beings con-
nected with these things, especially the
ones we personally know or see. We note
and discuss their particular idiosyncrasies,
their likenesses and differences; we com-
pare them with each other and with
ourselves. We are concerned, constantly
and immensely, with individuals.
It is right here, I believe, that we have a
102
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
clue to the explanation of the gulf be-
tween the biologist-student of human life
and the everyday observer of human
life. One deals primarily with the species ;
the other with individuals. One gives
his attention to humankind, the other
to particular human creatures. If we
knew other kinds of animals as in-
dividuals and we do occasionally, as
when we have a particular horse or dog
or cat or canary for companion, or scrape
literary acquaintance with Lobo the
Wolf, or Brer Rabbit, or as when the
farmer or his daughter goes out morning
and evening with the milking stool, or
the pigeon or chicken fancier feeds his
pets ; I have even come to know individual
bees in my glass-sided observation hives
if we knew other animals as individuals,
I say, we should have another point of
view regarding them. As it is we mostly
do not know other animals as individuals;
we know them as the biologist does, as
species. But as species they do not
interest many of us very much; although
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HUMAN LIFE
it is exactly as such that they do interest
the biologist. And it is primarily as
species that the biologist is interested in
humankind that is, when he observes
humankind as biologist and not as just
one of the rest of us. When one knows
animals only as species the interest there-
fore is chiefly biological; when one knows
animals as individuals they possess a new
and special interest. It is this special
interest that absorbs most of our atten-
tion to human kind, which we do know
primarily and particularly as individuals.
That is what really holds apart, I think,
the biologist and the rest of us when the
study of man is in question. That is
why the biologist's information to us
about man seems academic and not
pertinent: it leaves us cold. And why
the daily newspaper's information about
men fascinates and thrills us. And yet
and yet the biologist's information, as
far as he can confidently go with it, is of
huge importance to us as individuals.
Taken into account and acted on, it can
104
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
make wiser, less wasteful, more capable,
happier, individuals of us. It can help
put us into better physical and mental
harmony with the world we simply have
to live in. It is not that it merely makes
life safer and longer, but saner and larger.
And it need not rob us of the hopes and
beliefs that many of us cherish. It may
do nothing to encourage them, but it
cannot, certainly at present, make us give
them up. And I do not think it ever will.
105
HUMAN LIFE
THE BIOLOGIST AND DEATH
I HAVE had during the very writing
of this paper the distressing experience
of being brought, suddenly and dramat-
ically, to face that problem of human life,
that to most of us is the greatest of
all its problems, I mean the problem of
death. One evening, on a train from
Chicago to Washington, returning with a
companion from a week's association with
hundreds of other scientific men, I spent
the hours between dinner and bedtime
discussing with my companion the possi-
bilities of science in helping us to under-
stand Nature and Life. He was a man
who had given thirty years, with all the
advantage of great ability and highly-
perfected training, to scientific study.
He was withal a most attractive and
lovable personality. We parted at the
evening's end with smiles of friendship
and mutual encouragement to push on
106
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
with the task that we had in common.
In the morning I found him dead in his
berth.
What does the biologist have to tell us
of death? Well, first, true to his profes-
sional interest, he tells us of the facts and
the significance of the death of species.
He points to the hosts of extinct kinds of
animals, dead species, revealed by the
fossils in the rocks. He shows us how this
death of successive species reveals and
is itself a part of organic evolution, the
greatest fact, and its revelation the great-
est glory, in biological science. Death
of species is at once the revelation and
the proof of the struggle for existence
with the consequent survival of the fit.
Dead species have been the stepping
stones to new species; their history is the
history of organic evolution. Species are
unfit, or become unfit, for various rea-
sons; among them, the reason of over-
specialization. This is rather surprising,
for all organic evolution is a movement
from generalization toward specializa-
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HUMAN LIFE
tion, and yet in the very acquirement of
this specialization are sown the seeds of
species death. What organisms gain in
specialization they lose in plasticity.
They become so adapted that they lose
adaptability. Progress in one direction
involves, as someone has said, the closing
of the gates in countless other directions;
progression thus means a succession of
lost opportunities. The Irish stag spe-
cializing in antlers was brought by too
large antlers to species death. The great
Dinosaurs, lords of their epoch, extin-
guished themselves by too much much-
ness. There are even analogies of these
biologic happenings in human history.
And there are even biologists who see the
triumphantly super-specialized species,
man, in actual danger of species death
from too much specialization.
But one of the major lines of human
specialization is what might be called a
specialization in the direction of safety
from over-specialization; it is a specializa-
tion in general adaptability, not in par-
108
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
ticular adaptation. Man has become
able to follow varying natural conditions.
I have recently read a fascinating paper
on "Forests and Human Progress." In
it the author, Dr. Zon, gives a seizing
picture of human civilization, first in a
stage of being dominated by forests,
then in the stage of successful struggle
with forests, and finally in the present
stage of domination of forests. Some-
what similar stories could be told of man
and oceans, man and mountains, man
and deserts, man and climate. Man's
narrow biologic specialization think of
the narrow limits of temperature, oxygen,
food and other conditions in relation
to his mere maintenance of life is offset
by his wide social inheritance and his
educability. This gives him power to
withstand and dominate antagonistic Na-
ture: even power to add the forces of
Nature to his own forces. He fights
against natural selection; he substitutes a
purposeful artificial selection for it. His
possession of consciousness, reason and
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HUMAN LIFE
volition, by which he makes effective a
scientific method or technic of success-
ful struggle with nature, seems to insure
him against species death, at any rate in
any geologically near future. Cataclys-
mic world change would wipe him out
easily, so specific is his biological adapta-
tion to present conditions; but slow
change, and that seems the geologic rule,
finds him well protected, so developed
is his power of conscious adaptability
and his partial control of the conditions of
life. "What a plastic little creature man
is!" said Emerson. "So shifty, so adap-
tive! His body a chest of tools and he
making himself comfortable in every
climate, in every condition!"
But it is not human species death but
human individual death that most of us
look on as the problem of death. It is
here, as always, in individuals, including
our individual selves, not in species, that
most of us are principally interested.
And when we ask the biologist about
what he can tell us of death we are not
110
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
asking him about species death but
individual death; the death of our rela-
tives and friends, the death of my com-
panion just as he had reached his greatest
usefulness for science, for humanity, his
greatest power for achievement and,
because of it, his greatest joy in living and
our greatest loss in his passing. What has
the biologist to say about this kind of
death?
Truly, very little. He can explain or
describe death, as it affects the body, in
more precise terms than we commonly
use; he can describe the particular,
irreversible physical and chemical changes
that characterize or are physical death
in the exact terminology of science and
indicate the immediate specific causes
that set up these changes, but this is very
far from satisfying us. To explain to us
that the human body is a machine which
differs from other machines with which
it may be compared in that when once
stopped it cannot be set going again, is
not in the least to solve for most of us the
111
HUMAN LIFE
great problem. Is death really just what
it seems and what the biologist describes
it to be, or is it what so many would like
it to be, hope it is, and even firmly believe
it is? Can the human individual have an
ethereal spirit existence apart from, or
after, his bodily machine existence? Is
man immortal? That is what we insist
on asking the biologist who assumes a
knowledge beyond that of most of us
concerning human life.
The biologist, unless he be a scientific
bigot, confesses at once the limitations of
his knowledge. He does not claim that
his description of individual death neces-
sarily tells the whole story. But he claims
that it tells it as far as the kind of evi-
dence which he can accept as telling him
things he can rely on now permits. His
attention has been called to a great and
heterogeneous array of alleged evidence
or proof of spirit existence. We confront
him by the great intellectual difficulty
that most of us have in accepting what
seems the awful waste of Nature and of
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
man himself in having lifted humankind,
both as species and individual, to such a
peak of evolutionary development, if
death ends it all. Just because a single
part in the complex material machine,
or association of engines, that was my
friend's body, suddenly breaks down, is
that the end of his story? One evening
all that nature and man had done for
him were available for our good and his
happiness. The next morning, because a
trivial mechanical disharmony prevailed
during the night over what had been
for fifty years mechanical harmony, he is
nothing more to us or himself. This
seems preposterous, incredible. Must we
accept it, biologist?
Sadly he answers, I can give you no
comfort. That same waste of Nature's
efforts if it really is waste is apparent
all through the realm of life. This fish
produces a million eggs when only a few
will successfully develop into new indi-
viduals. How many thousand to one are
the odds against the successful achieve-
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HUMAN LIFE
ment of the extraordinarily complicated
life history of one of those internal
parasitic worms which demand successive
entrance into the bodies of two or more
hosts to complete its development? This
unconscious waste of Nature is no less
preposterous, incredible to me, he says,
than that every now and then, consciously
flying in the face of what seems to be all
self-interest, all enjoyment of life, all
reason, millions of men swarm out of
their homes, to use all their energy,
all their native cunning, all their hard-won
scientific knowledge, to kill each other,
to bring intense suffering to their wives
and children, to destroy their accumu-
lated material possessions, to burn the
created glories of their artist geniuses, to
work, in a word, all the waste and misery
that are the inevitable accompaniments
of war. Is this less incredible, he asks,
than that nature should tolerate the ex-
tinguishing after a period of functioning
of the complex of elaborately built up
machines which is the human body?
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AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
And he adds that the same extinguishing
comes to every other animal machine, to
all other living bodies. Do you ask for
something to continue after death of the
pet dog, the favorite riding horse, the
bird you shoot as game, or the insect you
crush under you feet? I find no proof,
scientific proof, he says, that death is not
the end of these creatures. And you do
not ask me to believe otherwise because
of some desire or belief on your part that
death is not their end. Well, no more do I
find any proof of the kind I am familiar
with and content to accept, that death is
not the end of man. I do not say that
death is the end; that I have scientific
proof that it really is the end, but I have
no proof, yet, that it is not the end.
The strong desire and hope and that
next conscious state, belief, which you
suggest to me as proof to you that death
does not end all, are not the kind of proof
on the basis of which I ask you to accept
what I do really feel able to tell you as
facts about human life, facts many of
115
HUMAN LIFE
which you are inclined to accept on my
word.
Nor have I been able to find proof, the
kind of proof that proves things to me,
of immortality by attending spiritist
seances or in reading the volumes of the
Society for Psychical Research or the
many other books that recite the expe-
riences of alleged participators in or ob-
servers of things of after death. I should,
indeed, truly be appalled by death, the
biologist says, and it would have a ter-
ror for me greater than it has even as a
possible complete extinguisher of my
personality, if it meant that it was the
beginning for me of a perpetual personal
spirit existence in which my thoughts
and conversations were to be of the kind
exampled by those recorded in the Psychi-
cal Research and spiritist books. I do
not wish to spend a spirit existence re-
sponding to calls from earth to describe
the quality of the cigars that I am per-
mitted to enjoy in my eternal life beyond.
But in the same breath the biologist says,
116
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
if he is not a bigoted biologist, that he has
no right to say and will not say that there
cannot be a human spirit life, nor a human
immortality, despite the fact that he has
seen no spirits and that the only immortal-
ity he has been able to discover among liv-
ing creatures is that of those one-celled ani-
mals and plants which, barring accident,
reach in a few hours or days after birth a
maturity, not followed by natural death,
but by a division of the whole body into
two parts each of which is an independ-
ent new individual, requiring but another
few hours or days to grow and develop and
reach maturity, and to divide, in turn,
into two more continuing individuals.
Even this immortality seems to require
for its full realization certain occasional
special stimulating physical or chemical
conditions, for after a few hundred suc-
ceeding generations of this self -perpetua-
tion the series tends to run out. Natural
death tends to appear. So that perhaps
after all this, at first sight, tangible, observ-
able material immortality is only delusion.
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HUMAN LIFE
THE BIOLOGIST AND SOUL
BUT, I say again, the biologist who is
not a bigot cannot authoritatively and
hence will not try to affirm that there
cannot be human immortality. He sim-
ply remains agnostic. He does not know.
Then there is the cognate matter of
soul in the living body. The biologist
sometimes has a difficult time trying to
understand what other people understand
by soul. If sweetness of disposition or
amiability of character is a symptom of
soul, as he is told by some, then he finds
soul in many animals. I had two taran-
tulas once in my laboratory, one of which
was a morose, ugly-tempered brute who,
whenever I approached him with playful
finger, became angry and, rearing on his
hinder two pairs of legs and unfolding his
great poison fangs, made ready to lunge
and strike whenever his malicious intel-
ligence assured him that he could reach
118
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
and wound me. But the other tarantula,
of the same kind and found in the same
field, would let me fondle him and would
walk in friendly fashion up my bare arm
without ever a thought of hurting me.
He was a sweetly dispositioned tarantula.
You see I have used terms in describ-
ing the behavior and character of these
spiders that we generally reserve for ac-
counts of human behavior and charac-
ter. And if you say that I should not
attribute character or disposition to them
but should limit myself to describing their
manner of behavior, because we do not
know that their behavior was controlled
by their disposition chemical or physical
stimuli may have controlled it then I
reply that I can quite as easily and much
more confidently describe the similarly
contrasting behavior of two human in-
dividuals in terms that we usually limit
ourselves to in describing animal be-
havior. The difference is, we have had
so much experience with human individ-
uals, that is, have made so many ob-
119
HUMAN LIFE
servations and so many experiments on
them, that in our search for the springs
of this behavior we have become accus-
tomed to feel justified in saying that such
and such behavior indicates such and
such kind of disposition, a large or small
possession of kindliness, or as some might
interpret it, soul. If we knew tarantulas
better we might be able to use the same
generalization and discriminate among
them as fairly.
Mother love reveals the human soul,
says one; but mother love is a common-
place among the higher animals and some
of the less high. Love and sacrifice of
self for family and community prove
soul: well, the worker bee works till it
falls dead on the threshold of the hive
with honey sac or pollen baskets filled
with food which it is bringing home to
feed the babies and queen and drones of
the hive. Faith in an all-wise and all-
kind God proves the soul in us. The
primitive Africans have no less faith
although their God is made of wood or
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AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
mud. John Muir's dog, Stickeen, seems
to have had no less faith in his master
at whose insistence he leaped the danger-
ous glacier crevasse that seemed too wide.
Had Stickeen a soul? The young robins
that make their first flutterings from the
nest perhaps have faith in the parent
birds' assurances. Are they soulful?
But other people mean other things
by soul : they mean the creative imagina-
tion, the capacity for a self-expression of
the wonderful things in them. Man's
mind is so wonderful, as evidenced by
his discoveries, his inventions, his poetry
and music and painting, that you say
there simply must be more than brain-
cells and nerve fibrils as basis for them;
there must be soul in him. But a simple
physical injury or disharmony in these
material body tissues means a prompt
end to all these wonders. A boy com-
panion of mine was called, because of
what he could do in music, a genius.
He fell one day from a gate post and
struck his head against a stone. In
HUMAN LIFE
a few weeks he was as strong a boy as he
had been before but he was no longer a
genius. There was no longer any soul in
his music. Was it his soul that struck
against the stone? In that great gray
building, the hospital called Salpetriere,
in Paris, there are a thousand human
beings whose brains and nervous systems
do not work in orderly fashion; they are
not hopelessly insane: they are tempora-
rily, some perhaps permanently, mentally
unbalanced, hysterical. For the time
being they show little sign of soul; but
when they are cured they will have soul
again. Soul seems to mean, or at least
to require, continuing mental balance.
The brain is a wonderful instrument
in some human beings: in others, whole
communities or tribes of others, it now
enables its possessors to count no more
than five. Human reason does wonders:
so does the instinct of the social wasps and
the fungus -farming ants. The Brooklyn
Bridge is a triumph of engineering: so is
the orb-web of the garden spider. I do
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
not mean that there is no difference
between the brain of man, on which seems
to depend a part at least of his soul,
and the cephalic ganglion of the ant.
But may not this difference be one of
mass and histologic differentiation and
organizations, rather than of fundamen-
tal kind or quality, that is, may it
not be quantitative rather than qualita-
tive? For all practical purposes, as I
said in the first paragraphs of my first
paper, this difference may be such as to
make two very different sorts of crea-
tures out of men and ants but is one to be
assumed to be fundamentally foreign to
the other? So fundamentally foreign that
one means soul and immortality and the
other only carnality and clay? Perhaps
it is: I do not know.
Much that means soul and human
attributes assumed to be peculiarly and
fundamentally derived from some source
other than one common to other forms of
life, has been plausibly shown by biol-
ogists and sociologists to be a highly
123
HUMAN LIFE
developed derivative of more animal-
like attributes. Love may be a beautiful
outgrowth from the animal necessities
of reproduction and protection; charity
from the requirements of an advantageous
development and exercise of altruism in
the case of an animal species which has
adopted the mutual aid principle in
evolution rather than the mutual fight
principle; hope and belief may be the
by-products of a brain development that
has outrun biological utility even as the
Irish stag's antlers outran advantage
in size. But I need not dwell on these
iconoclastic ingenuities of the cynical
materialist. They are familiar to you and
have already been accepted or rejected
by you; by some of you on a basis of
reason, by others on a basis of emotion.
Emotion itself is a great problem.
There are fundamental emotions or con-
scious states such as fear and hunger and
sex interest which are plainly closely
related to the brute part of our life, and
other less fundamental or derived emo-
124
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
tions, such as desire, hope and confidence
leading to belief, and doubt and de-
pression, leading to despondency, which
are apparently a product of our more
intellectual life. But that is to say that
they differ from the fundamental emo-
tions common to other animals as well
as ourselves only because of our more
elaborate and superior nervous develop-
ment. These derived emotions are among
the particularly distinguishing attributes
of human life as compared with animal
life and play a great part in all of our
everyday living. We see more of them,
are impressed more by them and think
more about them, under ordinary cir-
cumstances, than we do of the more
fundamental emotions, but how quickly
and powerfully the fundamental emotions
dominate us under circumstances which
strip off for the moment our veneer of
social inheritance and so-called peculiarly
human qualities. The war revealed this
vividly, although it also revealed how
some individuals had arrived at a stage
125
HUMAN LIFE
in human evolution which enabled them
to dominate their brute-inheritance in a
most wonderful and encouraging way.
An authorized lecturer representing a
certain organization with many adherents
stated in an address in Washington the
other evening that the world is a mental
phenomenon and hence that all the
things we know in it are controllable by
mind, or indeed are simply manifestations
of mind. That rather seems to put in the
hands of each person possessing mentality
the power to do things to or with this old
world and the conditions of life on it
much as he wills to do them.
I must confess that the biologist sees
the world differently. He finds it com-
posed of a lot of things, and sees going on,
in and about it, a lot of things which
are hard to reduce to mental phenomena
and hard to make amenable to his desires
and control. He realizes, of course, that
without the sense organs and brain no
one would have much awareness of the
world; that, indeed, one might think it
126
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
non-existent. Color is color to us and
sound sound only after a mental percep-
tion. But the different ether waves which
are perceived by us as color and the
atmospheric waves as sound might per-
fectly imaginably go on coursing through
the ether and atmosphere although no
human or animal sense-organs and brains
perceived them. In fact the physicist
is quite sure they would. If a photo-
graphic plate got in the way of the light
waves and a phonographic plate in the
way of the sound waves the existence of
these waves would be mechanically reg-
istered.
In Stanford University a number of
years ago I used to walk down an avenue
lined with trees I believe they were
trees to the beautiful quadrangle of
buildings, with a companion, now a
distinguished professor of philosophy in
an important Eastern university, who
proved during our walk each morning
by what was to me a verbally irrefutable
logical argument that there were no trees
HUMAN LIFE
along our way and no quadrangle before
us. However, when after successfully
avoiding the tree-trunks, we reached the
quadrangle we entered it quite naturally
and unsurprised, and went on under its
arcades to take up our duties in our
respective class rooms in it. We, or
rather the professor of philosophy, had
simply had a pleasant after-breakfast
exercise in mental gymnastics. We had
done our other gymnastics before break-
fast.
The biologist is willing to bet his life
that much of the world really exists in a
material sense. If the philosopher and
I were standing on a railway track with a
locomotive engine tearing towards us at
fifty miles an hour he might prove to
me, if there was time, by his interesting
play of words and logic, that nothing
was there and hence nothing was going
to happen if our non-existent bodies
continued to stand still on the non-
existent railway. But I would win my
bet that something very distressing would
128
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
happen unless we stepped off the track,
and that pretty quickly.
The biologist is a homely and practical-
minded person who is little given to over-
refined logic and debate but much given
to observation and experiment. He be-
lieves that his eyes and ears and brain
help him to the saving and enjoyment of
life by enabling him to know and adapt
his behavior to the world he lives in.
The man who makes the world all mental
may have reached a higher kind of
Weltanschauung than the biologist, but
the biologist, as far as I know him,
is not going yet, for the sake of ascend-
ing to this higher plane, to give up
remembering what happened to the man
who doesn't step off the track, nor will
he give up keeping his leg muscles in trim
for a quick jump. His low and materi-
alistic Weltanschauung is perhaps suffi-
ciently indicated by his using as argument
his readiness to bet his life and his enjoy-
ment of life on what he thinks he knows
about the reality of matter and energy.
HUMAN LIFE
But he knows, if he is a wise and honest
biologist, what I have so often repeated,
namely, that he doesn't know it all.
When the future or destiny of the human
individual are the subject of inquiry the
biologist has little more to say than I
have already indicated. He remembers
his laboratory and tells what he has
observed in it. Then he remembers his
wife and child and himself, and his heart,
not the heart of his laboratory experi-
ments, fills with such thrilling emotions
and his brain conjures up such pictures of
possibilities for himself and his family
and for all humankind that he wonders if
he is really the same being that observes
things in a laboratory or museum. His
laboratory tells him what a precarious and
fragile thing life is, how material and
condition-ruled and circumscribed a liv-
ing creature is. But his wife and child
and his own consciousness tell him how
much more, how immeasurably more,
there is in life than he learns in his
laboratory. It is this extra-laboratory
130
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
observation and realization of the possi-
bilities and actualities of human life that
make it, even to the biologist, the vivid,
many-colored, suggestive, thrilling thing
it is, the thing so full of occasionally
realized great moments and of glimpses
of infinitely great possibilities that some-
times it seems all mystery, all something
more than of this world, and hence all
something quite hopeless to study by the
methods of his science, or even quite
hopeless profitably even to wonder about.
Why not take it and make the most of it?
And then comes the insistent question:
Ah, how make the most of it? And he
becomes again the patient struggling
student of biology, that is the laws or
conditions of life.
131
HUMAN LIFE
THE BIOLOGIST AND THE FUTURE
THE chief goal of science is not merely
to describe the phenomena of matter and
life; it is to determine by long and close
observation and ingenious and repeated
experiment the order or regularity of
Nature, and hence to arrive at the position
of being able to say what will happen
under given conditions, in other words, to
prophesy. The goal of the biologist
however unattainable or most limitedly
attainable arrival at it may now seem to
be is to be able to speak with confidence
of the future behavior or fate of living
things; of living things as individuals and
as groups and kinds. The biologist
really aims at being able sometimes to
speak confidently about the future and
destiny of humankind. It is well to hitch
one's wagon to the stars. A Kansas poet
once exclaimed: "I'll wear Aldebaran as
a bosom-pin."
132
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
If the biologist finds himself now, as we
have already pointed out that he does,
quite unable to say much worth listening
to about the future of human beings after
death, he is at least ready to venture some
suggestions about the future of the human
species in its material relations to the
world and world conditions it lives in,
and about the possibilities or probabilities
of its further development or evolution.
This evolution is a fundamental ele-
ment in life. Primarily it simply means
change, but history, geologic and bio-
logic history, has shown that this change
has been progressive, it is change forward
and upward. What causes it we do not
know, despite our glimpse of some of
its factors; what it really is we do not
know, despite our sight of its results.
"Some call it Evolution, and others call
it God," sings William Carruth. But it
is real. Human life today is what it is
because of it; human life will be tomor-
row what it will be, because of it. Is the
biologist in position to hazard prophecy as
133
HUMAN LIFE
to the future course of human evolu-
tion?
As Conklin has pointed out, progressive
evolution of special lines of animals and
plants has limits fixed by its very nature.
Evolutionary progress of animal bodies
means specialization of the structure and
functions of these bodies. Specialization,
as we have indicated earlier in this dis-
cussion, means closer adaptation to a
certain set of conditions of life but also
means surrender of general adaptability.
If an animal has given up legs for the
sake of having flippers or wings or hands,
it has acquired a more specific use of its
limbs at the expense of a more general use
of them. Now man has gone a long, long
way in the progressive evolution of his
body and its functions. But it is appar-
ently true, as Conklin has said, that for
ten thousand years there has been no
notable progress in this evolution. If
evolution is carrying man forward
and we do not doubt it it is doing it in a
different way. This way seems to be the
134
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
way of social evolution, based on man's
social inheritance and the biologic factor
of mutual aid. If so, we have not to look
forward to future man as a physically
different man unless indeed he gives up
a little more of that original physical
equipment which enabled him to live
successfully in Glacial Time as "animal
among animals" but we have to see man
of the future as the possessor of an ever
more elaborate and higher development
of social inheritance, and more and more
capable, by virtue of this social inherit-
ance, of an inhibition of the vestigial brute
carry-overs in his biological inheritance.
That means, in ultimate analysis, that
future man can be consciously deter-
mined by man today, that human evolu-
tion has been turned over to human-
kind itself to direct.
What an opportunity, but at the same
time what a responsibility! Poor star-
fishes and clams, poor ants and bees, and
all the other little animal brothers to man
whose fate and future are all in the laps
135
HUMAN LIFE
\
of the gods of Nature. How they must
envy if they can envy that fortunate
big brother man who can make his future
life what he will, who is his own chief
factor in his own evolution. Some com-
munism-mad men sometimes hold up
before us the perfect, machine-turned,
communal life of ants and bees as a model
for humankind to copy. Do they realize
what an ant or a bee is born to? An
individual life entirely scheduled; a per-
sonal knowledge as large at birth as it
ever will be; a personal fate that can all
be told by the first seeress applied to, and
a species fate all in the hands of a coldly
impersonal and pitiless Nature. I some-
times feel sorry for the bees. If they
have sunshine and flowers they have also
the dark and crowded hive. And within
and without, their every hour is sched-
uled, their every activity predetermined.
I have even felt so exercised about the
bees that I have written a little book
about them in which I have imagined a
bee heroine called Nuova who is a new
136
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
bee born into the hive who revolts
against the monotony and fatalism and
hopelessness of usual bee life. Like other
books with heroines it has a happy end-
ing, but it wouldn't if it were a scientific
text-book.
Compared with the bees and all the
other animal kinds whose fate as species
depends on external circumstances and
inexorable natural law and whose evolu-
tionary progress is dependent on occa-
sional fortuitous germinal variations pro-
ducing small somatic changes of selective
advantage, what an opportunity man has
to determine, within limits, the course and
even the rapidity of his own evolution.
But also what a responsibility!
Here is where the biologist becomes the
preacher and exhorter. Here is where
biology and the appeal to reason, where
technical knowledge and common sense,
where science and religion join. The
soundest of science leads us to the con-
clusion that man, by virtue of the pos-
session of a social inheritance, as con-
137
HUMAN LIFE
trusted with the biological inheritance
which is all the inheritance that other
animal species have, a social inheritance
which gives him the present realities and
the future possibilities of a social evolu-
tion in addition to his more personal
evolution, has in his own hands a great
instrument for determining the fate of
himself as species; the future of mankind.
This, of course, is what the preacher and
the poet have always said -about man,
though on a basis of other conceptions as
to how man has been given this power.
But whatever the foundations for the
agreement between scientist and preacher
in their common conclusion, the interest-
ing and important thing is that they do
agree and hence that they can reinforce
each other in appealing to man con-
sciously to direct his efforts, with all his
advantage of scientific knowledge and all
his strength of belief, to the production
of a higher, a socially and morally higher,
future man type.
Thus these discussions of "human life
138
AS THE BIOLOGIST SEES IT
as a biologist sees it " seem to have a
proper moral, even as tested by so suspi-
cious a critic of biology as religion. After
all, the biologist does not see human life,
in its larger and higher aspects, so differ-
ently from the everyday observer or the
poet and preacher. He sees wonderful
possibilities in it, which man himself
can help to make realized. Now if only
the everyday observer, poet, and preacher
would see human life in regard to those
aspects on which the biologist is able to
throw some special light, more as the
biologist sees it, everything would be all
right. The biologist is quite convinced
on the basis of a kind of knowledge
which, on the whole, has proved itself
to all the world as a reliable kind of
knowledge, and one that stands the
test of time and liveableness, that man
can learn much about himself from bio-
logical study, and rely much on what he
learns in this way to help make his life
safer and saner, and himself more capable
of achievement, and hence happier. Bi-
139
HUMAN LIFE
ology is not a science for its own sake
alone. It is a science eminently useful
and practical to man and at the same
time it is a science highly inspiring to
him. For if it be depressing, as it may
be to some, though it is not to me, that
it teaches him that man's life is close
brother to all the rest of life, yet it is
inspiring in that the same time it reveals
how wonderfully much has been done by
Nature in making man, and how now
man has been let into partnership with
Nature for making better man. We are
not a foreign matter or being imposed on
Nature but Nature's own proudest prod-
uct. And the power we have for further
and higher development is not our own
unaided power but that of our own and
Nature's in combination. It is a com-
bination that should have almost limitless
possibilities.
140
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BIOLOGY LIBRARY
OCT 2-1- 1932
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DEC
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